Do Hands-Free Devices Affect Arizona Personal Injury Lawsuits?

Legal Activities & Personal Injury Negligence

When someone is injured in a car accident due to someone else’s negligence, he or she has the right to pursue financial recovery through a Phoenix car accident lawsuit. Many people believe negligence in a traffic accident only results from illegal activities; however, this is just not the case.

Legal activities that can affect car accident negligence in a personal injury case include:

• Driving while eating;
• driving while drowsy;
• driving while applying makeup;
• driving while distracted; and
• driving while using a hands-free device.

These perfectly legal activites can heavily impact a personal injury lawsuit in Arizona. Legal activities affect car accident negligence in Arizona because Arizona is a pure comparative negligence state.

Pure Comparative Negligence & Hands-Free Devices

In other states, personal injury lawsuits and insurance claims are determined by majority fault. If someone is at fault for more than 50% of an accident, he or she will recover nothing from the accident as the court determined he or she are responsible for the accident’s occurrence.

However, Arizona is a pure comparative negligence state.

Pure comparative negligence means the court can find each party accountable for a portion of the accident. Therefore, the court can find one person at fault for 10% of the accident, while finding the other person at fault for 90% of the accident. The court determines fault percentages based on a variety of factors: one of these factors is the use of a hands-free device.

Studies show that talking on hands-free devices are just as detrimental to someone’s focus as talking on a regular cell phone. In fact, drivers who are talking on a hands-free device will miss seeing up to 50% of what’s around them when driving.

Therefore, courts are likely to find someone using a hands-free device guilty of distracted driving, which, thanks to pure comparative negligence, can result in the court holding the person accountable for a higher percentage of the accident. This scenario is why hands-free devices can and will impact negligence in Arizona personal injury cases.

We hope this blog helped you learn a lot about negligence, and made you realize that just because something is legal (like using a hands-free device), it doesn’t mean it won’t impact a personal injury case.