According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the year 2023, the U.S. recorded a total of 300,900 injury-related deaths. Of that number, the CDC classified 222,698 as unintentional. This data was provided by the National Center for Health Statistics of the CDC in a data brief released in March 2025.
In addition, there were approximately 43.5 million emergency department visits for injuries in the year 2022, as per the national hospital surveys conducted by the CDC. These statistics highlight the significant impact of injuries on the lives of individuals and families; however, not every injury is a consequence of negligence and leads to personal injury cases.
Negligence plays a major part in US law, and when trying to establish a personal injury case, the plaintiff must prove that there was a breach of a duty of care, which resulted in injury. Personal injury encompasses multiple areas of law, including automobile negligence, negligence caused by property hazards, and more generally negligence.
Proving these aspects would require an attorney to carefully gather evidence from the accident. Negligence claims often rest on what can be documented. The legal team of Charlotte personal injury lawyer Brett E. Dressler recognizes that surveillance footage, eyewitness statements, medical records, and photos can all help build a negligence case.
Here is a look at the key elements of negligence and the evidence that can help support a personal injury case.
What Negligence Means in Court
The definition of negligence is failure to exercise the duty of care that a reasonable person should have exercised under similar circumstances. A driver texting while at an intersection fails to do their duty and can be an example of negligence. Another example is when a store manager knows about a leaking cooler and leaves the floor wet.
The Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School explains that courts typically look for five aspects to determine whether negligence occurred. These five aspects are a legal duty, a breach of that duty, harm to the plaintiff, and two forms of causation.
Duty and Breach
Duty comes first. Business owners owe a duty to customers, doctors to patients, and landlords to tenants. Drivers owe one to everyone sharing the road. Without a duty, the negligence claim cannot succeed.
Breach asks whether the defendant fell short. The Hand formula may be applied in some courts. It weighs the cost of a measure against the probability and severity of the harm that could have been avoided.
If there were repeated warnings for the property owner to secure the rail, but the owner failed to act, then it means that the property owner failed to take measures to prevent an obvious risk of a fall.
Building Proof of Breach
The evidence of what the accused did or failed to do lies in small details that can be lost. Photos from the location, camera footage from CCTV or road traffic cameras, witness testimonies, and police reports will all assist in reconstructing the incident.
Medical records add the timeline of the injury itself. Experts like accident reconstructionists and medical specialists can explain technical points that jurors would otherwise have to guess at.
Whatever the source, the evidence has to connect the defendant’s conduct to what actually happened.
Causation and Harm
Causation splits into two questions. The first asks whether the injury would have happened without the defendant’s conduct. The second asks whether harm was a foreseeable result of that conduct.
The driver who runs a red light and injures the cyclist will easily satisfy both questions. There is another situation where the second driver’s error complicates matters since the court has to determine which conduct caused which portion of the harm.
Harm provides the final link. Courts typically require physical injury or property damage, and they quantify this harm using medical expenses, repair estimates, and salary documentation. Some states include emotional harm independently.
When the Injured Person Shares Blame
Defendants often point back at the injured person, so the plaintiff’s own conduct matters as much as the defendant’s.
Most states follow a system called comparative negligence, where the recovery amount of an injured person is reduced based on the level of their fault. Some of these states apply a ‘modified’ comparative negligence system, meaning that if a plaintiff reaches or exceeds a set percentage of fault, they will be barred from recovery.
A tiny fraction of jurisdictions still follow contributory negligence, including Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Under this doctrine, any person seeking damages is totally barred from doing so if they bear any fault.
Negligence cases rarely depend on a single fact. Outcomes usually depend on whether the evidence supports each element of the claim and which state’s law applies.
