Do You Have a Personal Injury Case? Answer These 3 Questions

This is called liability. Somebody had a duty to be careful, they breached it, and their carelessness caused your injury. A driver ran a red. A store left a spill for two hours without a warning sign. A doctor missed a diagnosis a competent doctor would have caught.

Pure accidents — you tripped on your own feet, a tree fell in a storm, you slipped on ice that just formed — usually have no one to blame. No fault, no case. If you can't finish the sentence "they should have ___," that's a warning sign.

Being right isn't enough. You need evidence a jury (or an insurance adjuster) will accept. Police reports. Photos. Witnesses. Surveillance footage. Medical records connecting the injury to the incident. A store's cleaning logs. A driver's phone records.

The stronger the evidence, the higher the settlement. "He was texting" is a theory; his own phone records showing outgoing texts at 3:47:22 PM is a case.

Damages are what the injury cost you: medical bills, lost income, future medical care, pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment. A sore neck that resolves in two weeks with $600 in bills is technically a case; it's just not a case a contingency-fee attorney will take.

The rough floor for most firms is around $10,000 in provable damages. Below that, small claims court is faster. Above that, an attorney's cut still leaves you with more than you'd recover alone — usually substantially more.

Partial fault: most states let you recover even if you were partly to blame, though your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault. A few states bar recovery if you're 50% or 51% at fault. Don't self-diagnose your fault — attorneys have seen the tricks insurers use to shift blame.

Statute of limitations: every state has a deadline (usually 1–3 years for injury, shorter for claims against the government). Miss it and the strongest case in the world is worth zero. If your injury is more than a year old, call today, not next week.