Types of Negligence in Personal Injury Cases

So, what kind of negligence are you gonna have? You’re violating a traffic signal; drunk driving; failure to keep a careful lookout (it doesn’t say proper lookout in the jury instructions, it says careful); failure to operate the vehicle in a safe manner; failure to ride away; failure to sign a warning; failure to swerve, slack and speed or adjust when you know an accident’s gonna happen; failure to drive in excess a vehicle too fast for the circumstances. No MAI says you’ve violated the speed limit. It only talks about the speed limit relative to the circumstances, and that’s important because when you have bad weather or you have congested traffic or there are other circumstances around highway traffic construction which we’re getting into the summertime, it’s construction season, right? So, those are the times where you have to be vigilant about assessing your level of speed for the circumstances, and that’s what the jury instruction says. Or, yield them right away to another car pedestrian. Pedestrians and passengers only have an ordinary care standard; it is not a highest of care degree standard. So, that’s important to know. Sometimes you may want to assert a per se violation, and the reason why you’d want to do that is that you don’t have to prove negligence. If you prove a defendant violated a statute or regulation or ordinance, then you don’t have to say that they’re negligence. They’re automatically liable for the damages proximately caused by that such violation. So you could look for those ordinance violations in different places. It’s basically drunk driving or if you violate a red light or that kind of stuff. Now there are other cases.

Now, there are other cases. I had this up from the earlier thing. I don’t want to distract anybody from my amazing speech I’m about to give or I’m currently giving. So in this case right here, after this Deck collapsed and my client was injured. St. Louis County, bless their souls, came out and marked out of code 60 apartments because the porches were not connected to the walls. So, they violated an ordinance, and this is the timeline. You want to use timelines where you can. This is a great program to show a bunch of action or inaction on the part of the defendant…

Gary Burger

Founder | Injury Attorney
Gary Burger has dedicated his career to standing up against bullies. The founder and principal attorney of Burger Law | St. Louis Personal Injury Lawyer has helped hundreds of Missouri and Illinois individuals and families recover th …
Years of experience: 30 years
Location: St. Louis, MO

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