Transcript:
“Hi! I’m Darrell Castle, and I’m an attorney licensed to practice law right here in the state of Tennessee, and one of the areas of law that I practice in is automobile accident cases. Personal injury, in other words. And from time to time, people will ask a question: ‘What happens if the accident happens if the accident is both drivers’ fault? What if they share fault equally?’ Well, that doesn’t happen. That would be my answer. But actually, occasionally, it does. It does happen. “Here in Tennessee, we have what’s called ‘comparative fault,’ or ‘comparative negligence.’ That just means that the fault is compared and assigned to the two different drivers, so if you have fault assigned to you of 20%, in other words, you’re 20% liable for this injury, and if recovery was $10,000, you’d be entitled to $8,000. That’s the way it works. What if fault is 50/50, what then? Well then, you can’t recover, and neither party can recover. If fault is 50% or greater, so that’s how thing works. “Now, who determines what the fault is? Well, ultimately, it’s determined by the jury at trial. We would like to determine it before that, and we’d do that by assuming, by doing an investigation, and by assuming evidence, by looking at the police video cameras, that function and intersections, by getting at the black box computer records from your automobile and looking at them, things of that nature, police reports, and so forth. We can tell then kind of what fault is, and we go forward with the case from there. We try to protect our clients as best we can to make sure that their fault doesn’t climb up there toward 50%. That’s why you need to get an attorney, folks. You call me right now. I think you’ll be glad you did.”