Steps Expected of Plaintiff In A Personal Injury Case

In order to file a personal Injury claim, an injured victim must present his or her charges before the arrival of a deadline, as set by the statute of limitations. Yet that is the second of 2 steps that are expected of a victim/plaintiff.

Every plaintiff is expected to have engaged in a mitigation action. That means trying to keep the losses to a minimum. It also means not trying to increase the amount of an anticipated compensation. A mitigation action should keep the negative effects of a given injury in check as every plaintiff has a duty to mitigate.

What degree of mitigation is acceptable?

• The plaintiff should behave in a reasonable manner, when deciding how to proceed, after becoming injured.
• The plaintiff should take those actions that are possible and reasonable.
• Plaintiffs do not have the right to seek a damage award for the aggravation of an accident-caused injury.

Plaintiffs are not supposed to make an unreasonable refusal of medical treatment.
By the same token, Injury Lawyer in Waterloo stresses that no plaintiff should disregard a piece of medical advice. That includes deciding not to seek such advice, by not going to a scheduled appointment.

Mitigation that does not concern the treatment of injuries

As stated above, mitigation means not trying to increase the amount of an anticipated compensation. If a plaintiff expects to get compensated for the loss of wages, then proper mitigation would involve looking for a possible alternative to the position that the injured employee can no longer fill.

Admittedly, someone that had been injured could not walk around looking for a job opening, but he or she could search online for a possible position. If that search results in discovery of a possible job, the recovering employee then needs to decide on his or her action.

If a recovering employee must attend an independent medical exam (IME), then the results of that IME might determine the employee’s action. For instance, if the examining physician has said that the patient/employee has recovered fully, then the examined patient/employee would feel compelled to look for a new job.

Consequently, that same recovered worker might take a new job, and then find that it has proved too taxing. If that were to be the case, the same worker could seek disability leave. Any former co-workers or any members of the Human Resources Department might serve as a witness to the same worker’s mitigation efforts.

He or she did try to keep the losses to a minimum for the insurance company of his or her old employer. He or she did not try to increase the amount of the anticipated compensation by sitting around and adding to the size of the accumulated lost wages.