In the context of legal claims, personal injury is a broad term that refers to cases in which a person has the legal right to take legal action against an individual or entity whose wrongful action caused the person harm.
As a general proposition, a personal injury claim arises when three basic facts exist:
- An individual or entity owed you a duty of care: As citizens and human beings, we all have basic obligations not to act in ways that will put others at risk of harm. In the law, these obligations are known as duties of care. Motorists have a duty of care to others on the road not to drive recklessly, for example.
- The individual or entity violated that duty of care through a wrongful action: A person or company violates a duty of care by acting, or failing to act, in a way that wrongfully puts others at risk of harm.
- The actions caused injury: Legal liability arises when that violation of a duty of care leads to an incident, accident, or other condition that injures someone.
A personal injury lawyer is an attorney who represents the person injured by someone else’s violation of a duty of care. Oftentimes, one of the attorney’s core functions is to investigate a client’s injury, working backward to figure out what action led to the injury, and who had a duty not to engage in that action.