Most accident sites can be easily looked at to determine who was responsible for causing an accident. It may be as simple as somebody being rear ended at a red light, or someone going through a stop sign and causing the crash. How do you determine fault when multiple cars are in an accident? Here are some tips to figure it out.
Single Drive Responsibility
Negligence is the main factor that determines fault in a car accident, and it still applies when there are multiple cars involved. For example, if your car was rear ended and caused you to crash into the driver in front of your car, and you are unsure of who is at fault for the car that you hit.
In this situation, you would need to prove you would not have caused the accident if it was not for the other driver hitting you. Your foot would have remained on the brake pedal and you would not have moved forward. While this situation may seem quite clear who is at fault, others are not so obvious.
Multiple Driver Responsibility
It is possible for multiple drivers to be responsible for causing an accident through comparative or contributory negligence.
Comparative negligence will consider each driver involved in the accident and place a percentage of blame on them for the accident.
Unfortunately, some states do not use comparative negligence and classify all accidents with multiple responsible drivers as contributory negligence. An accident with contributory negligence is when any driver that is partially responsible for causing an accident will not receive any compensation for the damage caused to their car.
For example, consider when a driver goes through a red light and collides with another driver that was speeding. Both would be violating traffic laws in their own ways that result in neither driver being compensated with contributory negligence. Meanwhile, comparative negligence would potentially assign the driver that went through the red light a higher percentage of fault, since they were the main driver responsible for the accident. The driver that was speeding would be given a small percentage of fault, since the accident may not have occurred due to the speeding alone.
The bottom line is that drivers that did not act with negligence should have no problem receiving compensation for an auto accident when multiple cars are involved. For help proving you were not negligent, work with a lawyer, such as Helfand, David PA, in your area.
Share4 October 2017
Were you injured at work and fighting to get the workers compensation that you have paid into each year? Sometimes, getting those payments can be very difficult. What do you do when an employer fights the claim? Do you need a lawyer to help you through the process? How will you pay for a lawyer if you cannot even pay your electric bill? You are probably as lost as I was when I went through the process. Fortunately, you can learn from my experience with the system and find the answers to many of the questions that you have about filing a workers comp claim and fighting the system when it is denied.
