The Differences Between Personal & Bodily Injury
While words like “injury” and “damage” have fairly basic meanings in casual conversation, they are far more complex terms in the world of law. This can be an important distinction to make, especially in cases of personal injury or bodily injury.
While an injured party is a component of both types of legal cases, there are several unique factors that affect the direction a case will take. Here are a few of the distinguishing components of a personal injury case and a bodily injury case.
What is bodily injury?
Put simply, bodily injury is any sort of physical injury your body sustains. This can be an injury that is clearly visible, such as a burn or cut, or something that can not be seen by the naked eye, like an illness or damage to any internal organs.
It’s important to note that in order to be classified as a bodily injury, the injury does not have to be chronic or permanent. Bodily injury may be what’s causing you to press charges; however, there is no such thing is a bodily injury lawyer.
When you seek a settlement for a physical injury you must go through a personal injury lawyer, who may specialize in cases like yours.
What is personal injury?
If you think of bodily injury as the effect, then personal injury is the act of seeking out compensation from the cause of the injury. A personal injury case must define the plaintiff’s injury (generally a bodily injury) and then establish who is at fault and what the total damages are.
When considering whether you should seek legal representation for your accident, it’s crucial that you understand that personal injury lawyers don’t always deal with physically injured people. A personal injury attorney may also help recoup damages to your personal property, if you were the victim of vandalism, property damage, or involved in a car accident that wasn’t your fault.
Of course, if you were injured, you may also receive compensation for those damages. This is in addition to compensation to cover the costs of treatment, pain and suffering, emotional distress, and even loss of enjoyment if you can no longer enjoy a hobby because of an accident.
No matter what the accident you were involved in was, liability will need to be determined. Depending on who is liable, your settlement could vary greatly. For example, if the negligence of another driver is deemed fully responsible for your accident, you will likely receive a large settlement.
Conversely, if you are also determined to be partially responsible for the accident, the judge may rule for comparative negligence, which means that your settlement would most likely be smaller.
Seeking legal counsel for injury
Of course, if you’re injured and seeking a settlement for damages, you need to find an injury lawyer who can take your case. Often, it can be helpful to look at the services offered by a legal team to learn whether or not their area of expertise is a good fit for your injury suit.
This can be as simple as picking up the phone and giving a law firm a call, or researching their services online. Nova Scotia’s Preszler Law is a great example of how an attorney can make getting in touch about a consultation easy using digital technology, since they even have a web-based chat option through their website, https://www.preszlerlaw-ns.com/.
Ultimately, an experienced personal injury lawyer can best explain your likelihood of winning a personal injury case. Even so, it’s just as important that you understand some basic terminology before you head into your consultation, so that you don’t get tripped up in the details of defining bodily injury and personal injury.
