If you hurt yourself, that’s never fun. However, what if you hurt yourself, and you feel that someone else caused the injury? If you can prove that in court, then you might win some money via a personal injury lawsuit of Public park injuries.
Let’s consider what might happen if you injure yourself in a public park, like Klyde Warran Park in Dallas. Klyde Warren Park sees 1.3 million yearly visitors, and many report that it’s one of their favorite places in the city to spend time. If you hurt yourself while you’re there, though, you may wonder if you can potentially collect some money.
We’ll talk about public park injuries and lawsuits in detail now.
Who Might You Sue if You Hurt Yourself in a Public Park?
If you hurt yourself in virtually any scenario, you can sue someone. Unless you can prove conclusively that someone’s actions or inactions caused your injury, though, you might not get any money out of the deal of Public Park Injuries.
If you hurt yourself in a public park, you must first figure out who you can sue if you’re going to move forward with a lawsuit. In almost all of these cases, you will need to consult with a lawyer. They can tell you who you might sue after a public park injury, if anyone.
In most cases, you will try to sue the government entity that runs the park. They should maintain it, and you might try to claim in a lawsuit that they didn’t do that correctly.
You will typically sue the city or municipality in which you can find the park. A lawyer would call this a premises liability claim. It’s one of the more common types of personal injury cases.
You’ll Need to Find a Lawyer Who Handles These Cases
If you hurt yourself in a public park and decide you’re at least thinking about suing the entity that runs it, then you will need to locate and hire a personal injury attorney who knows all about these kinds of cases. They should take on clients in the personal injury niche in general and the premises liability one in particular.
If you know anyone who can recommend a personal injury lawyer to you, then you might contact a certain law firm based on that reason. If you don’t know anyone who can recommend a good personal injury lawyer, then you will need to do some research your own.
It helps to look at some online reviews. If you make a shortlist of personal injury lawyers who you feel might represent you well in this type of a lawsuit, then formulate it after looking at the Google Business reviews for each lawyer you’re considering.
If they have four-and-a-half out of five stars, then you can probably feel confident when you hire them. A law firm with poor reviews shouldn’t make your list.
If you can find a lawyer who filed a public park personal injury case for a client in the past, then that’s great. However, at the very least you should only hire a lawyer with plenty of previous personal injury lawsuit experience, even if none had anything to do with public park injuries specifically.
Government Immunity
When you find and hire what seems like the right lawyer, they can tell you about the obstacles you potentially face that might prevent you from collecting any money in damages. To a certain extent, local governments often have what lawyers call provisional immunity.
Basically, it simply means that governments have some degree of immunity that protects them from lawsuits from private citizens. You may still be able to sue the entity that runs the park, and you could win, but you will probably only do so if you can prove gross negligence.
Proving Negligence Becomes Crucial
Your lawyer will likely explain this to you as well before you move forward with filing the paperwork that gets the lawsuit off the ground. To win your case, you will probably need to prove that the government entity that runs the park should have done something to maintain it, but they did not do that. This negligent action led directly to you hurting yourself.
Proving that sort of thing might challenge you and your lawyer. They will likely have investigators working for them. However, those investigators may have a tough time finding concrete evidence that proves negligence by the entity that should have maintained the park and kept it safe for visitors.
If you can’t come up with any real proof that conclusively establishes negligence, you will likely lose your case. That is why public park cases have an inherent difficulty level that might dissuade some lawyers from even representing you. They may feel like this lawsuit does not have much of a chance of yielding positive results from a monetary standpoint.
Actionable Public Park Lawsuit Examples
If you’re going to win a public park lawsuit, then you will likely do so only in a few very specific instances. For example, maybe you fell on a pathway in the park that the entity running the park did not maintain. Perhaps you broke your leg or arm.
If you can show photos or videos that show a big crack in the pathway, then perhaps you can get the entity that runs the park to settle. Maybe you won’t get as much money as you wanted, but you could get at least something.
If you hurt yourself on some broken equipment in the park, that might yield a settlement offer as well. Dangerous obstacles or faulty signage that caused an injury might also get you a satisfactory conclusion to the lawsuit.
The more evidence you can produce that shows the entity that runs the park clearly didn’t maintain it, the more likely you can cash in. The legal battle might take weeks or months in some cases, so prepare yourself mentally if you decide to proceed with such an endeavor.
