Explaining a Plaintiff’s Duty to Mitigate Damages in a Personal Injury Accident Case

Personal injury accident cases occur when the negligence of some other person or party has caused a victim, or plaintiff, to have received some type of physical, emotional, or mental injury that has caused the victim to incur damages. These types of cases are predicated upon the fact that the negligent party owed the injured party a specific legal duty and that duty was subsequently violated in some way. However, the plaintiffs in such cases also have a legal duty after the injury has been sustained to mitigate their damages. San Antonio personal injury lawyer Michael Grossman provides the following informative article to further explain a plaintiff’s need to mitigate damages in a personal injury accident case.

A duty to mitigate damages means that an injured person must take reasonable steps towards ensuring that their sustained injury does not grow worse over time without proper medical care. An example of a person not mitigating their damages is often helpful. Imagine that a construction worker was injured while on the job and suffered a laceration to his hand. The injury is painful, but the construction worker attempts to continue working through the pain, not wanting to take days off from work or seek medical attention. If, over the course of a few weeks the cut becomes infected and the injured construction worker still fails to seek proper medical attention, he can be held liable for not mitigating his damages. In other words, he would not be able to seek compensation for an infected hand because he did not take reasonable steps towards getting medical attention for his hand when it was only lacerated.

It should be noted that only a reasonable amount of care must be taken in order to mitigate damages. In other words, the construction worker in the example above would not have been required to take unreasonable steps to mitigate his damages like sealing himself off in a sterile room until the cut had healed. By seeking medical attention within a reasonable amount of time after having suffered the accident, the construction worker will likely have been considered to have mitigated his damages.

Why is mitigating damages so important for a plaintiff in a personal injury case? If a victim has not sought reasonable measures to mitigate their damages, they could stand to lose a large amount, or even all, of the compensation that would have otherwise been awarded to them from a negligent party or parties. As such, it’s important that, if you’ve been injured in an accident, you seek medical attention in a reasonable amount of time so that your injuries do not become more severe. It should also be noted that, should money be an issue for you in seeking medical attention, an experienced attorney ought to be able to ensure that those medical bills are covered as part of the damages sought in your personal injury case.

A plaintiff’s duty to mitigate damages is important as the failure to do so could result in little to no compensation for the plaintiff. As such, Tyler personal injury attorney Michael Grossman recommends that if you’ve been injured in an accident and are seeking compensation for your injury, be sure to take reasonable care of your injury so that you can be said to have mitigated your damages.