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If someone has become hurt while engaged in a risky activity, that injured individual might find it difficult to obtain any compensation from whatever facility or organization had planned that particular activity. There could be evidence that the individual’s assumption of risk had motivated his or her participation in that potentially harmful form of recreation.
The legal system has named 2 types of assumption of risk.
Express: Acknowledgement of the assumption, typically by the signing of a waiver. Sometimes the waiver gets hidden in a contact. A personal injury lawyer would seek to determine the exact level of harm that the client, an injured participant had agreed to accept. A personal injury attorney would also want to learn the exact scope of the signed agreement.
Implied: The person who became injured was aware of the risks; yet that some individual chose to accept exposure to potential harm. A personal injury lawyer would say that an implied assumption entails a willingness to deal with the known and recognized sources of potential harm, and not those that had remained unpredictable.
An adaptation to the strategy for countering an allegation of a plaintiff’s implied assumption of risk
If an injured individual were to sue the facility or organization that had sponsored a rather risky activity, the defendant’s attorney might argue that the plaintiff had demonstrated an implied assumption of risk. If the defense team were to win that particular case, then the plaintiff would not receive any form of monetary compensation.
Some states have eliminated claims about an implied assumption of risk as a legal defense. In those states, an injured person might get accused of comparative or contributory negligence. In states that use the principle of comparative negligence, the plaintiff and defendant would share the fault, and also the money in any compensation package.
Suppose that a city chose to discontinue utilization of diagonal crosswalks at a specific intersection. Suppose, too, that one impatient pedestrian chose to try crossing to a diagonal corner on a busy day. Picture this too: A driver failed to obey the red light at the same intersection, while the impatient pedestrian was crossing.
If the pedestrian got injured and sued the driver, and the case proceeded to a courtroom, the defendant and plaintiff would share the fault. Each of them would receive some percentage of whatever award was granted by the court. Because the driver had broken an established traffic law, that same driver would probably receive a smaller fraction of the award.
The pedestrian’s Personal Injury Lawyer in Sudbury would be pleased with the fact that the accident had happened in a state that had chosen to eliminate the assumption of implied risk as a defense.