If someone else’s negligence caused your injuries, you may have grounds to seek compensation through a personal injury lawsuit.
Proving negligence in a personal injury case requires you to establish four elements of negligence: duty of care, breach of that duty, causation, and damages. Understanding how to prove negligence is the first step toward recovering what you are owed.
Stone Rose Law represents plaintiffs in Arizona personal injury claims. In this post, we explain the elements of negligence, the evidence you need, and the burden of proof in negligence cases under Arizona law.
If you have been injured and want to know your legal options, call our law firm at (480) 631-3025 to speak with one of our experienced personal injury attorneys. Or you can reach us online to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation.
What Are the Elements of a Negligence Claim?
A negligence claim has four elements. You must persuade a jury (or a judge in a bench trial) that all four of these are more likely than not:
- The defendant owed you a legal duty of care.
- The defendant breached that duty.
- This breach of duty resulted in the harm you suffered (causation).
- You suffered actual, measurable damages.
In Arizona, proving negligence requires establishing each of the following four elements by a preponderance of the evidence legal standard. Let’s look at how each element works.
The Duty of Care
A legal duty of care is the legal responsibility to exercise reasonable care to avoid causing harm to others. Arizona courts recognize duties that arise from statutes, common law, and special relationships.
What is “reasonable” is based on an objective standard — what a reasonably prudent person of ordinary intelligence and experience would do under similar circumstances.
For specialists like doctors, the standard is measured against other professionals in their specialized field.
Here are common examples of how the duty of care applies:
- Motor vehicles: Drivers must follow traffic laws, obey traffic signals, and avoid distracted or impaired driving to protect other motorists and pedestrians.
- Property owners: A property owner owes invitees a duty to keep premises reasonably safe or warn of known dangers.
- Medical professionals: Doctors must exercise reasonable care consistent with accepted practices in their field.
A breach of duty occurs when the party fails to act as a reasonable person would under similar circumstances or fails to act when a person under similar circumstances would have.
How the Duty of Care Is Breached
Now that we understand what the duty of care is, it is relatively easy to see how a person can breach that duty. In the above examples, the following behaviors would be, at least arguably, a breach of the duty to others to behave in a way not to cause harm:
- Motor vehicle operation: speeding, ignoring stop signs or traffic lights, driving and texting at the same time, or driving while intoxicated by alcohol or drugs.
- Premises liability: allowing customers to shop in a store with a liquid spill on the floor that management or staff knows about but neglects to clean up before someone slips and falls.
- Construction activities: Not fencing off construction sites or allowing members of the public to access the construction site where they can be hurt by falling objects or construction equipment.
- Medical professionals: Operating on the wrong organ, failing to observe proper sanitary precautions to avoid infections, or leaving a sponge in the patient’s body at the end of a surgical procedure.
A breach is shown by demonstrating a clear departure from required standard of care.
For each of these behaviors, the standard of negligence requires you to ask whether a reasonable person would do any of these things. If your answer is “No,” then this is likely sufficient grounds to conclude that the duty of care has been breached.
The Breach of Duty and Causation
It is not enough that the defendant breached a duty of care. You must also show that the defendant’s actions caused the harm you suffered. This requires proving two types of causation:
Direct Cause: the other party was the direct result of the harm you suffered – this is pretty straightforward in most cases.
Proximate Cause: Was the harm caused a reasonably foreseeable result of the defendant’s actions? Proximate cause limits a defendant’s legal responsibility to consequences that were reasonably predictable. (Also called “but-for” causation): Would the plaintiff’s injury have occurred “but for” the defendant’s negligence? If the answer is no, the cause in fact can be established as proximate cause.
In Arizona, a superseding cause — an unforeseeable, extraordinary intervening event that occurs after the defendant’s negligence — can break the chain of proximate causation and relieve the defendant of liability.
Proving causation is often the most challenging part of a negligence case. An experienced personal injury attorney can help gather the evidence needed to establish that the defendant’s negligence caused your injuries.
Measuring Harm in Money Damages
It is not enough to merely argue that the defendant was negligent. You need to show that you suffered measurable harm as a result of the negligence.
Harm is measured in monetary value through economic or non-economic damages.
Economic Damages
Economic damages include medical bills, ongoing medical treatment and care, lost wages, property damage, and long-term disability or reduced earning capacity.
You prove these with billing statements, invoices, pay stubs, and repair estimates.
Non-Economic Damages
Non-economic damages include pain and suffering, emotional distress, mental anguish, and loss of companionship.
If you have experienced pain or psychological harm because of the accident, these damages can make up a substantial part of a personal injury claim’s value.
In rare cases involving extreme or intentional misconduct (an evil mind), punitive damages may also be available to punish the defendant and deter similar behavior.
Evidence Needed to Prove Negligence Claims
Personal injury claims have two requirements for the plaintiff to meet: the burden of persuasion and the burden of proof.
The burden of proof is the standard (“preponderance of the evidence”), while the burden of persuasion is the obligation to actually convince the fact‑finder that your claim meets that standard.
What Kinds of Evidence Do You Need to Support a Personal Injury Claim?
Evidence takes various forms, like documentary, testimonial, and circumstantial evidence. All of these forms can be useful in meeting your burden of proof.
Documentary Evidence
Documentary evidence can be valuable for you in multiple ways in a personal injury case.
- Medical bills and repair invoices are important to prove your economic damages.
- Medical records help to establish the existence and severity of your injuries and the treatment you need to recover.
- Police reports, maintenance logs, and safety records can help to establish the facts of the accident and what may have caused it.
- Photographs and videos of the accident scene, damaged property, and your injuries can help to establish the circumstances of the incident and the nature of the harm you have suffered.
Testimonial Evidence
Testimonial evidence takes two basic forms: lay testimony and expert testimony.
- Lay testimony can be your testimony and the testimony of eyewitnesses and other witnesses who can attest to the effects the incident had on you.
- Expert testimony can help reconstruct what happened to cause an accident, assess the extent and severity of your injuries, and establish non-economic damages.
An important role of your personal injury attorney will be to investigate the facts of the accident and to help you gather and organize all the available evidence to present a strong case on your behalf in settlement negotiations or at trial.
Common Challenges in Proving Negligence
The at-fault party’s insurance company and defense lawyers will try to dispute your evidence, deny your claim, and/or shift blame onto you. Without legal guidance, insurers can exploit gaps in your negligence case and try to settle for less than your damages sustained.
One common defense is comparative fault (sometimes still called contributory negligence).
Arizona follows a pure comparative negligence system under A.R.S. § 12-2505, meaning your compensation is reduced by your percentage of fault.
For example, in a car accident case where you are found 20% at fault, your recovery would be reduced by 20%.
The type of negligence involved can impact your ability to recover compensation. This is why strong proof of negligence and an experienced advocate for the injured party matter.
Negligence Claims in Settlement Negotiations
Most personal injury claims do not go to court, but settle instead. This does not mean that you will not have to establish the four elements of negligence above. Insurance companies will cooperate with you or fight you, depending on what they believe is the strength of your case.
The stronger your evidence in support of a negligence claim is, the better your odds of receiving the maximum amount of money damages for your injuries.
This is why settlement negotiations take place in parallel with trial preparations: the more insurance companies and defense lawyers believe that you are serious about going to court, the more seriously they will take you in negotiations.
Do You Have Questions About Negligence in a Personal Injury Claim?
Although the four elements of negligence we have discussed here may seem simple in concept, especially with causation, they can be challenging to prove.
An experienced Arizona personal injury lawyer, like one you will have if you choose to have Stone Rose Law represent you, will know how to prove negligence and will know the right strategies to pursue, all while also ensuring that all legal deadlines are met and your rights are protected throughout the process.
To learn more about how our law firm can help you after an injury-causing accident, call us at (480) 631-3025 at any time to reach one of our personal injury claim professionals. You can also use our online contact form to contact us and schedule a free initial consultation.
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