How Does The Claim Change If Victim Is Partly At Fault?

Dog bite cases are quite common in the United States. And hundreds of lawsuits are filed every year due to dog bite issues. If you have also suffered from dog bites or other injuries due to an attack by the dog, you can bring about a claim against the owner of that dog with the help of your Boynton Beach accident attorney. However, rest assured that whenever you file such a claim, the insurance company or the dog owner’s lawyer would probably argue that it was partly due to your fault. In such cases, the owner would surely argue that you were breaking the law and were trespassing when the dog attacked you. This is done purely to put some blame on you so as to reduce their own liability.

Pinning Fault and Liability

However, things change drastically when you were, actually at fault. A lot of times we tend to ignore certain facts and do not think about them until something majorly wrong has already happened. What if you did not see the ‘beware of dogs’ sign even when it was there due to sheer negligence and entered the home of the dog owner. Perhaps you tried to befriend a dog not understanding that it could get problematic for you. When such things happen, things change a lot in terms of filing the claim. This is the reason that you should first consult a good Boynton Beach accident attorney to find out if you should actually file a claim or not in case you were also partly to blame.

Various states have different rules to deal with dog bite cases and there are usually three approaches that the law takes when dealing with such cases. The first approach that a lot of states take up is that of pure comparative negligence. Your Boynton Beach accident attorney would be able to tell you that in such states, your compensation would reduce in accordance with the involvement that you had in the case. In any case, you would still get some compensation even if you were mostly to blame.

Comparative negligence

The second approach that is taken up by most other states is that of modified comparative negligence. This means that in such states the plaintiff would not be able to claim anything in case their share of liability exceeds fifty percent in a case.

The third and the last category that is still applicable in a few states is that of contributory negligence. If you check with your Boynton Beach accident attorney, he would tell you that in case you were to share the blame even if it is by a small percentage, you would not be able to recover anything as compensation in the case. In such states, it is better to not file the claim if there is even a slight liability on the plaintiff’s side. For more information visit here: Drucker Law Offices