In Colorado personal injury law, liability is the financial responsibility shouldered by an individual or an entity for a personal injury. Typically, but not always, the party that bears liability was at fault for causing the injury. The consequence of liability is that the liable party must pay damages to the injury victim.
What are the Different Types of Liability?
Colorado law recognizes more than one form of liability. Negligence, strict liability, intentional tort liability, and vicarious liability are all independent forms of liability.
Negligence Liability
Put simply, negligence is carelessness. Perhaps the defendant didn’t intend to hurt you, but they shouldn’t have been chatting on their phone while driving. Negligence arises when someone breaches their duty of care towards someone else. It is the most common form of personal injury liability.
Negligence vs Liability: Causation and Damages
Breaching a legal duty of care constitutes negligence, but proving negligence alone is not enough to prove liability. You must also prove damages (harm) and causation. Once you prove duty, breach, harm, and causation, you have established liability.
Strict Liability
Strict liability is liability without fault. That doesn’t seem fair, does it? But it makes sense under certain circumstances, such as product liability and inherently dangerous activities.
Product liability
Strict liability often applies when someone suffers an injury due to a defective and unreasonably dangerous product. You might sue in strict liability, for example, if a cigarette lighter blew up in your face. The justification for allowing strict liability lawsuits is that it is almost impossible for a consumer to prove negligence on the part of a manufacturer (who might even be located overseas).
Inherently dangerous activities
Inherently dangerous activities include dynamite blasting and working with hazardous waste. The justification for applying strict liability is that you cannot make these activities safe no matter how much care you exercise. Therefore, the law treats you as the insurer of the activity.
Intentional Torts
It’s not difficult to understand why someone ought to bear liability for punching you in the nose, locking you in a closet, or sexually assaulting you. Often, intentional torts are also crimes. These are all examples of intentional torts.
Vicarious Liability
Vicarious liability applies when the law imposes liability on one party for the misconduct of another party. Typically, the law imposes vicarious liability when the at-fault party probably cannot afford to pay damages to the personal injury victim.
Employer liability
An employer can bear vicarious liability for the misconduct of its employee as long as the employee was acting within the scope of their employment. You can sue UPS, for example, if their driver caused an accident by reckless driving. You don’t have to prove UPS was at fault.
Parent/child liability
Colorado law sometimes holds parents liable for the intentional or negligent misconduct of their minor child.
Burden of Proof
The burden of proof for any kind of personal injury liability is on the persona asserting liability–typically the injury victim. To win, you need to prove liability by “a preponderance of the evidence,” which means something similar to “more likely than not.”
What Are Affirmative Defenses Against Liability?
In response to a personal injury claim, a defendant might simply issue a general denial. A general denial just means: “Your evidence is insufficient to meet your burden of establishing my liability.”
An affirmative defense, on the other hand, asserts that “I am not liable (or my liability is diminished) even if everything you say is true, because of [insert affirmative defense here]’ Following are some examples of affirmative defenses:
- Failure to mitigate damages: A plaintiff has a duty to reduce damages as much as possible. For example, a plaintiff may refuse to take their medication, resulting in worse health.
- Assumption of risk: Voluntarily undertaking a known risk — skydiving, for example.
- Comparative negligence: This involves weighing each party’s respective fault in an accident. For example, one driver may have been speeding, but the other driver was texting, causing an accident.
- Failure to comply with the statute of limitations deadline: In Colorado, you typically have two years after an accident to file a personal injury claim (There are exceptions, however.).
- Consent: Consent is the same as giving permission. For example, you cannot sue a boxer for knocking you out if you voluntarily stepped into the ring with them.
- Self-defense or defense of others
A defendant who asserts an affirmative defense bears the burden of proving that particular defense. The accident victim still bears the burden of proving the general personal injury claim.
Additionally, note that some of these affirmative defenses are partial. If you refuse to take prescribed medication for an injury that the defendant caused, for example, the defendant can only evade liability to the extent that your refusal to take your medication worsened your condition.
If you need to establish liability against someone to enforce your personal injury claim, you might need the help of a Lakewood, Colorado, personal injury lawyer. At your earliest convenience, contact us for a free initial consultation with our attorneys at Matos Personal Injury Lawyers.