Accidents happen, even in the workplace, and sometimes no one is at fault. More often, however, some kind of negligence is behind an injury. If your employer has been negligent, a workplace injury lawyer in Houston may be able to help you prove this to strengthen your case.
How a Workplace Injury Lawyer in Houston Will Help You Prove Employer Negligence
The first step is to understand what type of negligence you might be dealing with, and your lawyer will help you with this. Some of the typical examples of negligence include negligence in hiring practices, negligence in supervision, and negligence in training. There are other possibilities, but these are some of the biggest. Learn more here about how a lawyer can help you determine whether there has been negligence.
Negligent Hiring
You can bring a negligent hiring claim if you are able to show that your employer should have known someone they hired was dangerous or untrustworthy. This usually happens because an employer has not properly vetted a possible employee before putting them into a position where they could cause harm to others.
Negligent Supervision
Here, what you need to show is that your employer did not properly monitor employees or do anything substantive to control their actions. You might see this happen when a supervisor doesn’t perform safety monitoring correctly or when a manager or supervisor regularly asks employees to take on tasks for which they are not trained. In these cases, it’s not unusual for someone to get hurt.
Negligent Training
In these cases, what you need to show is that your employer was either not training employees or was training them incorrectly, and that because of this poor training, you were injured by your fellow employee. This lack of or poor training creates a generally dangerous working environment, and employers are required to provide a safe situation for their people.
What You Need
To prove a claim of negligence against your employer, you will need to show four important things. First, that the employer owed you a duty of care (this is typically the easiest thing to prove). Next, you will have to show that this duty of care was breached in some way, for example, by an employer failing to run a background check on a new hire. Third, you need to show that you were actually injured and that your injuries are something that can be measured and quantified. The final step is to link the injury to the breach of duty of care.
Some evidence that may help might be your own personal recollections and impressions of the incident and how you’ve suffered since, which you should write down as soon as possible after it happens. You will also need to gather any documents that might shed light on what happened, like company policies and your employee handbook, performance reviews for you or other employees, and email or other correspondence you’ve had with your employer. The statements of your fellow employees, video evidence, and photos from the scene can also be helpful.
If your employer has been negligent, don’t hesitate to contact a qualified employment law attorney. An attorney will be able to tell you whether you have a case for negligence and what to do next.
