Sometimes it’s a little difficult to tell who is responsible for an accident. Sometimes both parties in an accident are partly responsible. For example, someone runs a red light, but at the same intersection another person is speeding through the green and an accident occurs. Well, whose fault is it? It’s probably both parties fault to some degree or another. The accident wouldn’t have happened if the person had stopped at the red light, but also the accident wouldn’t have happened unless the other person going through the green hadn’t been speeding. So it’s sometimes difficult to say that one person is a hundred percent at fault for an accident and another person is zero percent.
Comparing Fault
Often both parties have to share responsibility for the cause of the accident. In Florida we have a doctrine called comparative negligence. This means that the jury or a finder of fact is required to compare the fault of all the parties involved in the accident.
You May Have A Partial Claim
If you’re involved in an accident which may be partly your fault, that doesn’t mean that you’re completely excluded from making a claim. It means that your claim is limited by the degree that the accident is your fault. But you still have a claim to the degree that the other person caused the accident. So for example, if we have a simple case of only two vehicles involved in an accident, and one vehicle is found to be sixty percent at fault and the other vehicle is found to be forty percent at fault, well the vehicle that was forty percent at fault would collect sixty percent of that person’s losses as a consequence of the accident. They wouldn’t collect that portion that they themselves caused.
