If you or somebody you love sustains an injury caused by the negligence of another individual or entity in Kentucky, you should be able to recover compensation for your losses. However, what happens if you were partially at fault for the injuries that caused your injuries?

Here, we want to discuss how Kentucky handles partial fault when it comes to personal injury lawsuits. This is important information because other parties in the case could use claims of partial fault in an effort to lower the amount of money they pay you in a settlement.

How Does Partial Fault Work in Kentucky?

States around the US use various systems in order to determine what happens if a person is partially responsible for causing their own injuries. In some cases, individuals are not able to recover any compensation if they are the least bit responsible. In other states, individuals are barred from recovering compensation if they are 50% or more responsible for causing their injuries.

However, Kentucky operates under a “pure comparative negligence” system. This means that an individual can recover compensation regardless of how much fault they had for the incident. Under this system, though, the individual will receive reduced compensation based on their percentage of fault.

How Much Can My Claim Be Reduced for Partial Fault?

In order to properly demonstrate how reduced compensation works, we want to set up a relatively simple theoretical injury scenario. Suppose you are going through a grocery store when you slip on a spill of orange juice from a container that fell off the shelf. In this scenario, let us suppose that you sustained $10,000 worth of medical bills. In general, if you can show that the grocery store employees knew about the spill but failed to promptly clean it up, you would be able to recover full compensation for your losses.

However, for the purposes of this scenario, let us suppose that you were looking at your phone browsing through social media when the incident occurred and did not see the spill. In this incident, it is entirely possible that a personal injury jury may find that you were 30% responsible for the incident because you were staring at your phone when the incident occurred.

In this scenario, you would be awarded $7,000 instead of the full $10,000 to account for your percentage of fault.

Working With an Attorney to Secure Compensation

If you or somebody you care about has sustained an injury caused by the careless or negligent actions of another individual or entity, you need to work with a skilled attorney as soon as possible. When you have an attorney by your side, you will have an advocate who can push back against any allegations of shared fault in order to help you secure a higher compensation amount.

An attorney can get to work right away on your case. This will include conducting an investigation into the incident and gathering all evidence needed to prove liability. This will also include working with trusted medical and economic experts to help properly calculate your total estimated losses to present to the insurance carriers or a personal injury jury if necessary.