The 4 Elements of Negligence

The 4 Elements of Negligence

Daniel Hall 20/04/2022
The 4 Elements of Negligence

Owning a business means being responsible for everything about it.

You set the direction, hire the staff, make important decisions, and are most exposed to benefits and risks. Businesses come with plenty of risks, whether it be the danger of failing, legal risks, or even liability risks. If someone files a lawsuit against your business, it could be crippling if the right protections aren't in place. 

That's why it's so important to get professional liability insurance online. You need to protect your business in case something goes wrong, such as a mistake on your part. Unfortunately, you can get sued whether there's an error or not. All it takes is for a client to think you did, and they may choose to try to find you negligent and seek damages. With professional liability, you can get compensation for your legal fees and damages that might be levied against you. Otherwise, you could have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, which your business might not be able to withstand. 

If you disagree with a client, it's always better to know your rights and responsibilities. This would include understanding what negligence means and how it might apply to a certain situation. Here are the four elements of negligence that you need to know. 

1. Duty

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For a client to bring a negligence claim against you, they must first show that you have a duty to them to provide a certain service. When it comes to professional liability, this would mean that you must have a duty of care to your customers as a business. Take, for example, a doctor. A doctor would have a duty to provide the best health treatment and advice to their patients. That is a contract, even unwritten, between the healthcare provider and the patient. The patient should reasonably expect to be treated professionally. 

The same goes for any type of business and client relationship. For example, if you run a business that provides financial advice, you must provide it to the best of your abilities. Often, a contract or invoice shows that you have that relationship with your clients. If a complainant cannot demonstrate that you have a duty of care towards them, they cannot claim you are negligent. 

This is why you need to present yourself as a compliant company at all times. This can be done by approaching some entity formation experts for help organizing your business. For example, using a lawyer to create a limited liability company (LLC) or incorporate a business can help protect you from large damages in case of an unexpected lawsuit.

2. Breach

Once it's been established that there is a duty of care, the client must show that that duty has been breached somehow. For a doctor, it could be that they misdiagnose a patient. For financial service providers, they may give poor advice based on a miscalculation. These are breaches that could conceivably harm a client in some way. 

In some cases, it can be tricky to determine whether there was a breach. The client might think so, but the service provider may have done everything correctly, but things didn't work out. For example, the doctor may have prescribed the right drug for an ailment, but it just didn't work for the patient, or they were allergic to a component of the medication, but nobody knew. For a financial advisor, sometimes markets shift, which makes them unpredictable. The client must prove that the service provider made an error or omitted information that caused the loss. 

3. Causation

In science, there is a term that states "correlation is not causation." This means that even if it seems like two things are related, it could just be a coincidence. To use the doctor's example, imagine if they prescribe certain medications and the patient gets sick and suffers from a serious illness shortly after. On the surface, it might seem like the medication was the cause of the subsequent illness. 

However, that might not be the case. It could just be a coincidence that the patient would get a serious illness regardless. To provide negligence, the patient must show that the medication was the wrong option and that it caused further damage. 

Along with this, proximate causation is a closely related element. It means that the service provider must have been able to reasonably foresee the consequences of the error. If the patient never mentioned having an allergy to a component of that medication, for example, the doctor would have had no reason to think there would be harm. 

4. Damages

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Finally, the complainant must prove that there were damages in the first place. When it comes to professional liability, those damages can be financial or they can be physical. To continue the example of the doctor, let's say they prescribed the wrong medication. This is very much an error. However, the medication prescribed does not harm the patient in any way, and it is quickly rectified. The patient then gets the correct medication and recovers from their original affliction. The doctor would have made a potentially dangerous mistake, but everything worked out fine in the end. In this case, the patient would not be able to make a claim of negligence because there was no real damage caused. 

Remember, there does not have to be physical harm caused. There can be property damage or there can be financial harm. For example, an architect could design a building. However, because of a miscalculation, there are support beams installed that are not strong enough to support the weight that they need to. In this case, the architect may be found negligent and may have to compensate the property owner for lost income and for the repairs needed to rectify the issue. 


You might think that you are the very best at what you do and that you only hire the very best employees. Therefore, you don't need professional liability insurance. You could not be more wrong. The fact is, even the very best make mistakes. You could have a bad day, you could be distracted, or you might hit the wrong button with only your calculator. Whatever the reason, you should not let a simple mistake ruin your business completely. Make sure that you take steps to avoid errors and protect yourself with professional liability insurance.

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Daniel Hall

Business Expert

Daniel Hall is an experienced digital marketer, author and world traveller. He spends a lot of his free time flipping through books and learning about a plethora of topics.

 
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