Nebraska Personal Injury Law
When someone injures you, it can impact your life in a lot of different ways. There are the medical bills, time off work to heal and attend appointments, and the pain and disruption to your normal routine. All of these issues can quickly add up, financially, physically, and emotionally.
You may want to explore filing a personal injury law suit against the person who hurt you. If a court finds in your favor, that person could be required to pay you for the economic costs of your medical care and lost wages, and the non-economic costs of your pain and suffering.
Each state has its own laws for personal injury cases. For personal injury lawsuits in Omaha, Lincoln, Kearney, or anywhere else in the state, it’s important to understand Nebraska’s specific rules.
What is a Personal Injury Lawsuit?
You may have the grounds to sue someone who hurt you so that you can recover financial compensation for the injury they caused. Many kinds of injuries will apply here, from the intentional to the accidental. Filing a personal injury lawsuit is a way to try and make your financial situation as close to “normal” as possible, as if you never had the injury in the first place.
What is an Intentional Personal Injury?
Intentional injuries come from actions like assaults and batteries. It’s the result of someone purposefully making some kind of contact with you. It doesn’t necessarily matter if they intended to injure you, only that they intended to make the contact that ended up injuring you.
What is an Accidental Personal Injury?
Not every accident that leads to injury will be grounds for a personal injury suit, but many are. This is especially true for accidents born of negligence.
Negligent accidents are those that weren’t caused on purpose, but could have been prevented if someone had exercised reasonable care. Typically, negligence cases involve someone doing something in an irresponsible way that they should have realized could cause an injury. Breaking Nebraska’s distracting driving laws and texting behind the wheel, for example, could be grounds for a personal injury suit if that driver hits and injures someone. The reasonable expectation is that people will stay off their phones while they’re driving, and going against that standard can make someone liable for any injuries that action causes.
In a few cases, even non-negligent accidents can serve as the basis for a personal injury suit. Under the rules of strict liability, people may need to compensate someone they injured, even if they took all the necessary safety precautions or didn’t behave in an unreasonable manner.
Participating in “abnormally dangerous activities” could make someone strictly liable for injuries. Certain kinds of fireworks are legal in Nebraska during specific times of the year, but if someone is setting them off and hurts someone, even if they were using the fireworks carefully, that person could still be responsible for paying the medical bills for the one they injured.
What are the Limits on Personal Liability in Nebraska?
Nebraska does have some restrictions on when and how you can file your personal injury lawsuit, as well as limiting how much money you can get in some cases.
Nebraska Comparative Fault
Nebraska has a comparative fault statute. That means that if you also did something negligent while you were injured by someone else’s negligence, the court may find you partially to blame for your injuries and decrease your compensation. If a speeding driver hits your car, their excessive speed may be considered negligence. However, if you were making an illegal turn when you were hit, your own negligence may have contributed to the accident.
If the court decides that you were say, 20 percent at fault for your injuries, the maximum amount you could receive wold be 80 percent of what you asked for. You may be barred from collecting any amount at all if the court things you are more than 50 percent responsible for your injuries.
Nebraska Statute of Limitations for Personal Injury
The statute of limitations for filing a personal injury lawsuit in Nebraska is two years. That means you only have two years from the time of your injury to file, or else the court will likely refuse to hear your case and you won’t get the compensation you need.
There are some exceptions to this rule, like if you were so badly harmed that you were unable to file for the first six months after your injury. In that case, your timeline to file may not begin until after the incapacitation is over.
Nebraska Cap on Personal Injury Damages
Most personal injury cases in Nebraska don’t have a cap on damages, so you could potentially recover nearly any justifiable amount of money.
Some cases may limit how much money you can receive, however. Medical malpractice suits, a type of negligence case, are often capped at $1.75 million for economic and non-economic charges combined.