Not All Accidents Are Accidental

We call any event in which a person is injured an accident. We use the two terms, injury and accident, interchangeably.

The problem is, we often use the word accident when no one is to blame for an event. “I’m sorry, it was an accident!” Something just happened. Two people bump into one another. No fault, no foul. It’s not nice to point fingers!

In personal injury law, however, we look deeper. If your brakes go out while you’re driving down a hill, you try to learn why they went out. Did your mechanic fail to reassemble the brake properly after a repair? Was there a defect in the brake’s manufacture or design? What if someone maliciously cut the brakelines?

If you can establish that the accident was in fact caused by the negligence of another party, you may be able to demand compensation in a court of law. And if it was done on purpose, or out of recklessness, you can demand even more.

That’s why personal injury law — one of the most ancient of legal concepts — is so important. Justice demands that people who suffer harm — the ancient word for harm is tort — are allowed to demand compensation from the party at fault.

Take away this idea of negligence, and there is no way to obtain justice. The powerful can do anything they want to the rest of us and we have to sit and take it.

This is why personal injury law is one of the cornerstones of justice. It applies to auto accidents, slip-and-falls, product failures and every other kind of negligence. It holds people accountable for acts of malice, acts of carelessness, acts of wrongdoing, even acts of omission.

That’s the business we are in at Sousa & Minogue, LLC, and we are proud of it. Pursuing a little thing called justice.