If you have a personal injury case to bring against another, the best course of action is to talk to a lawyer. But even your lawyer may have a difficult time proving causation in your personal injury case. That’s because the legal concept of causation is much more complicated than most people believe.

Why is this the case? And is there any way to simplify it?

Working With a Lawyer

Personal injury lawyers specialize in navigating the difficult terrain of negligence cases. If you’ve been personally injured, your best course of action is to hire one as soon as possible. 

Typically, personal injury lawyers are willing to have a free consultation with you. If your case is worth pursuing, you won’t have to pay anything until you win a settlement.

Your lawyer can help you understand the details of your case and how you might prove all the requisite elements of negligence, including causation. They’ll also represent you in negotiations and attempt to win you the biggest settlement possible. They’re indispensable in helping you get the best possible results.

The Basics of Causation in a Negligence Case

If you want to win a settlement in a personal injury case, you must prove all four elements of negligence. You must prove that the defendant had a duty of care with respect to you and your property. You must prove that the defendant breached that duty in some material way. You must prove that you suffered harm to your person or property. And you must prove that the defendant’s breach of duty was directly responsible for the harm you suffered. Otherwise, your damages may not be compensable.

Legally, negligence cases must demonstrate causation in two key ways. You must demonstrate that the breach of duty was both the actual cause of the harm and the proximate cause of the harm.

Actual cause is sometimes called “cause in fact.” For a breach of duty to be meaningfully linked to damages, it must typically pass the “but-for” test. In other words, the harm would not have occurred but for the defendant’s actions or omissions. As a simple example, you might be able to show that the car accident wouldn’t have occurred if the defendant wasn’t speeding.

You must also show proximate cause, which is much trickier in some cases. Proximate cause is often a matter of spatial and temporal proximity, as well as reasonable foreseeability; the defendant must have taken an action or omitted an action in such a way that a reasonable person would foresee such harm as possible to occur.

Things get even deeper and more challenging when typical tests of actual cause and proximate cause don’t apply, such as when there are multiple actors and factors responsible for harm.

Why Is It So Complicated?

So why is causation so complicated in the legal field?

There are several explanations for this:

· The natural complexities of causation. You don’t have to be a philosopher to understand that the mechanics of causation are naturally complicated. Almost any individual event is the byproduct of countless events and conditions that preceded it. And in some cases, these factors are extraordinarily complicated and interwoven. Imagine that you are late for work; was this because you stayed up too late last night, because your alarm wasn’t loud enough, because you spilled something on your favorite shirt and had to change, because you got stuck behind somebody slow, or because of some combination of all these and 100 other little factors? This isn’t always easy to parse out.

· The history of the law. Modern law has a long and confusing history. Over the past few 100 years, our concepts of torts, including negligence, have evolved significantly. Only relatively recently have we begun separating causation into meaningfully discrete elements, and there are no definitive authorities who think this is the end of the road.

· Different jurisdictions. To make matters even more complicated, different jurisdictions have different approaches to negligence, and causation in particular. Different judges in different areas may take different paths to determining causational links between different events.

· Subjective opinions. On some level, causation is a subjective question. There may be objective elements associated with causation, such as a blade causing a cut, but most questions of causation are sufficiently complicated to require jurors and judges to make subjective determinations about them.

The bad news is that causation is a very difficult legal principle for a layperson to navigate. The good news is, you should never have to do this on your own. If you’re ever injured as a result of someone else’s actions or omissions, the damages you suffered are likely compensable, and you can work with the lawyer to prove all the requisite elements of negligence and win the compensation you deserve.