Elements of a Tort: DCBI

Hello, this is Hunter Cavell of Cavell Law coming to you from Solon, Ohio today. I want to talk about what you need to prove as a plaintiff in a lawsuit. Now there are certain lawsuits that are breaches of contract, which we’ll get into in another video, but I’m talking more about the car accident or personal injury cases or something where someone has done you wrong. These are called torts and somebody has to be at fault and you sue them for your damages.

Now there are four parts to every tort. I call them DBCI, duty, breach, causation, and injury. So, the first thing is the person who did wrong had to have a duty. So, let’s take a car accident for example. If somebody hits you in a car, the other driver had a duty not to hit you.

The second one is breach. So again, with my example, the person who hit you in the car breached the duty of not hitting you by hitting you. Seems kind of redundant, but that’s how it works.
And then causation and injury kind of go together. You got hit, you get whiplash and your neck hurts. That accident caused you to have the injury.

And the real question is, what are your damages? This could be medical bills, pain and suffering, things like that. So those are the four things you need to prove beyond what’s called a preponderance of the evidence. So more likely than not that it happened, duty, breach, causation and injury. There are other technical rules such as the statute of limitations, which means you have to bring it within a certain amount of time or you can’t recover at all. So if you have any questions about a case, whether you need to pursue it or you’ve been sued, feel free to give me a call at 440-940-6441 or email me here. Thanks and have a great day.