Mʏᴇʀs & Cᴏᴍᴘᴀɴʏ
When Being 50% Right Means You're 100% Wrong
We represented a motorcyclist who–by his own admission–had a problem with speed. He rode too fast. And he was riding too fast when he got into the accident.
The insurance company acknowledged that our client had a bad head injury. But it argued that if he wouldn’t have been speeding the accident would have never happened.
That's partially true. But it shows an incomplete understanding of Washington law.
When a defendant says the plaintiff was at fault for the wreck, they have to prove it. That means showing the plaintiff had a duty, breached it and the the breach was the proximate cause of the injury.
Under Washington law proximate cause has two components: cause in fact and legal causation.
What the insurance company was talking about was cause in fact. Cause in fact relates to whether the act or omission actually caused the injury. In other words, but for the act or omission would the injury have happened?
Legal causation--the other half of proximate cause-- relates to whether, as a matter of policy, responsibility should extend for the resulting harm. This was the part of the analysis the insurance company missed.
Fortunately the Washington Court of Appeals has addressed this exact issue: “Excessive speed which does no more than bring favored and disfavored drivers to the same location at same time cannot be a proximate cause.”
So the insurance company was 50 percent right. Speed was a cause in fact. But it wasn't a legal cause of the collision. And because it wasn't a legal cause, our client wasn't comparatively negligent/at-fault for the wreck.
I'm not sure--absent an instruction from the Court about speed alone not being a proximate cause--a jury would embrace this argument. I usually use my mom as a litmus test. She would not be able to get past the point the motorcycle rider was speeding.
Fortunately we were able to have more sway/influence over the insurance company. It paid half a million dollars to settle the case.
Two claps for the Court of Appeals. It did a really good job separating cause in fact from legal cause in the context of speed and motor vehicle collisions. It's nice when the law feels more like a logical tool than an obstacle to justice.