For a loved one to fall victim to a wrongful death is no doubt a traumatic experience—one that words on their own struggle to describe. At JD Haas, as a team of injury lawyers, we’re here to help you through these terrible times with legal action.
To do so, though, we’ll need to know a bit about your case, namely if negligence was involved or not, to assess its viability. If you have not the slightest what the term means in the legal sense, don’t fret. Below, we’ll dive into the concept and help you to understand how it plays into your wrongful death case.
How the Concepts Work Together
To be a viable wrongful death case, the legal concept of negligence must be involved; if it isn’t, it may fall into another category of law, and may even be a criminal case. Negligence refers to, primarily, a breach of duty of care. In other words, the responsible party had a duty to prevent the accident that caused the death of your loved one, but failed to uphold it.
A hypothetical example: a person falls and breaks their neck on the icy sidewalk to their apartment. After a long medical battle, they pass away. If it can be proven that the complex’s property management company should have de-iced the sidewalks, negligence may be at play, and the case could need the expertise of a wrongful death attorney.
Negligence Must Be the Cause of Death
If a direct, causal link isn’t proven between the other party and the death, negligence is not at play. For example, if the above person were to have a sudden heart attack that caused them to fall, the cause of the fall would not have been the ice beneath their feet, and thus the property management company could not be held negligent—unless it can be proven that the person would not have fallen without that ice.
Negligence Requires a Pre-Existing Responsibility
If “duty of care”—the legal term for the responsibility we talked about earlier—cannot be established, there is no way an entity can be held negligent. In this case, if the aforementioned person were to trip and fall on an icy sidewalk halfway across town, their loved ones would not be able to establish their property management company’s negligence, as that company is not responsible for the sidewalks of the entire city.
JD Haas Is Here to Take the Complications Out of Law
Whether you need a wrongful death lawyer, a car accident lawyer, or even a dog bite attorney, our versatile team of legal professionals is ready to stand by your side. Give our office a call today at (952) 234-2925. We also serve Rochester, Bloomington, and Saint Paul.
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