What is a personal injury case?

What is a personal injury case?

One of the main purposes of the law is to compensate persons for a wrong another person or entity has perpetrated upon them which results in a loss of some sort.

For instance, if you’re a buyer and a seller agrees to sell you a specific number of goods at a specific price and that seller reneges on the deal in one or more ways, then the law provides you with a remedy (possibly a lawsuit) intended to make you whole should you prevail. In a very real sense, you have been “injured”. But you have been injured financially.

It is also true that, in a very real sense, you have been personally injured. What could be more personal than losing one’s money?

But the legal field of personal injury, the field in which I practice law, is generally limited to bodily injury.

The personal in personal injury literally refers to the human body. Of course, I deal with “financial” injury also, that is, when my client loses money because his injury resulted in medical bills, lost wages and so forth, but the main loss is bodily loss.

It’s a cliché that lawyers have their own language. But it’s a true cliché. Lawyers refer to legal language as “terms of art,” and it has been developed and refined over the centuries. Words which mean one thing to a lawyer may mean something entirely different to a nonlawyer. So, when you see a legal term, simply look it up for its precise definition. You may be glad you did.