A personal injury lawsuit can be an excellent way of getting the compensation that you are owed. In some cases, an insurance claim can be sufficient, but if you had a serious injury, then the payout from insurance might not be enough. However, lawsuits can be pretty complicated and risky. If you don't win your lawsuit, then you might have potentially wasted a lot of money in legal fees. To help increase your chances of winning, here are some key laws to familiarize yourself with when it comes to filing in Kansas:

Your Window of Opportunity

First of all, you need to be actutely aware of how large your window of opportunity is. If you fail to file within a certain amount of time, your case might be dead in the water. In Kansas, the statute of limitations for a personal injury lawsuit is 2 years. However, not all is lost if you failed to file within that amount of time. If you fit some very specific criteria, then you could still have a shot at successfully filing.

Firstly, most states will make exceptions for minors who want to file. Instead of being forced to file within 2 years of the incident, the minor needs to file with 2 years of legally becoming an adult.

The second common exception is for instances of injuries that were not discovered until much later. If you were negligently exposed to carcinogens in the line of work and developed cancer a decade later, then you could have a shot at a personal injury lawsuits as long as you file within 2 years of discovering the damage.

Comparative Negligence

You also need to really pay attention to how much responsibility you bore for your injury. If you did play a role in the injury, then you might not get as much money as you want.

Specifically, you will have your compensation reduced proportionally to your responsibility. If you were 40% responsible, then you will only get 60% of the compensation that you wanted. If you were 30% responsible, then you would get 70%, and so on and so forth. However, this takes a sharp turn for the worse when your responsibility exceeds 50%.

If the other side can prove that you were responsible for more than half of your injuries, then you could potentially forfeit the claim to any compensation at all. For this reason, you want to be incredibly cautious about how much responsibility the other party can prove that you had. If you know that they have evidence that proves that you were more than half responsible, then you might want to reconsider filing a lawsuit at all.

For a personal injury attorney, contact a law firm such as Morales Law.

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