- February 18, 2025
- Personal Injury
When you’re facing mounting medical bills and lost wages after an accident, it’s important to understand how fault affects your right to compensation. Kansas uses a system called comparative negligence that can determine whether you recover full compensation, partial compensation, or nothing at all. Therefore, understanding comparative negligence in Kansas personal injury cases is important as you begin your claims journey.
The Combined Negligence Rule
Every Percentage Point Can Change Your Future
Here’s the key thing about fault in Kansas: it’s about adding up everyone else’s fault and comparing it to yours. An oversimplification of the comparative negligence rule would be that for you to recover money after an accident, other people need to be more at fault than you are.
Let’s use real numbers to see how this works. Say you’re in a car accident where both a delivery truck and a taxi played a part. If you’re 40% at fault, the delivery driver is 35% at fault, and the taxi driver is 25% at fault, you can recover money. Why? Because their combined fault (60%) is more than yours (40%).
But flip those numbers around. If you’re 60% at fault, and they’re only 40% at fault combined, you can’t recover anything. The comparative negligence law says if you’re more at fault than everyone else put together, you can’t collect.
The difference between recovering compensation and walking away empty-handed often comes down to proving precise percentages of fault for each party involved.
How Is Fault Divided?
After an accident, the court needs to determine exactly how much each person’s actions contributed to what happened. This is why evidence becomes so important. You need to show:
- The exact timing and sequence of events
- Whether safety procedures were followed
- Whether equipment was properly maintained
- How quickly someone responded to danger
- Whether warnings were posted and visible
- If anyone was distracted or impaired
- Whether required safety equipment was used.
In a car accident case, the court will look at specific actions like speeding, running red lights, not using turn signals, not maintaining a safe distance, and distracted driving. Each of these actions gets assigned a percentage, and these percentages must total 100%. This matters because your compensation depends directly on these numbers.
If you’ve been injured in an accident, contact Palmer Law Group at (785) 233-1836 to understand your rights under Kansas comparative negligence law.
What Happens When Someone Dies?
Fighting for Justice While Dealing With Loss
The law has a specific provision for wrongful death cases stipulating that the negligence of the person who died gets imputed to the party making the claim. This means that if your loved one was partly at fault in the accident that took their life, that percentage reduces what their estate can recover.
Multiple Parties and Payments
When multiple parties are at fault, each party pays their proportional share. If one defendant is 30% at fault and another is 20%, they pay only their respective percentages of the total damages. It’s important to know this because if one defendant can’t pay, you cannot collect their share from the others.
Success in comparative negligence cases requires proving not just that others were at fault but exactly how their combined negligence exceeds yours.
The Evidence Journey
A Good Case Relies on Strong Evidence
Building a strong case requires gathering and preserving multiple types of evidence, including:
- Detailed photographs from multiple angles
- Witness statements while memories are fresh
- Expert analysis of physical evidence
- Medical records showing exactly how injuries occurred
- Documentation of all economic losses
- Surveillance footage
- Maintenance records
- Training documentation
- Safety protocols and procedures.
It doesn’t matter that you weren’t at fault if you can’t prove it, which is why getting a personal injury attorney with years of experience in your specific situation matters.
What Is Covered Under Kansas’s Comparative Negligence Law?
Kansas’s comparative negligence law applies not just to personal injuries but also to property damage and economic loss. This means the same rules govern cases ranging from car accidents to business disputes. The key is always proving that your negligence was less than the combined negligence of those you’re claiming against.
Contact Palmer Law Group at (785) 233-1836 to discuss your injury case and protect your rights under Kansas comparative negligence laws.
How Long Do You Have to File a Claim?
Don’t Let Delays Cost You Your Recovery
Kansas gives you two years to file most claims, but waiting makes it harder to prove favorable fault percentages. You don’t want to wait so long that the evidence disappears or until witnesses lose their memories of the event. The sooner you start documenting and preserving evidence, the stronger your position becomes.
Dealing With the Insurance Company
Insurance adjusters understand these rules well. They’ll often try to inflate your percentage of fault just enough to prevent any recovery. This makes it very important to have someone who knows how to counter these tactics and prove the true distribution of fault.
While most cases settle before trial, negotiating favorable fault percentages requires skill and preparation. Palmer Law Group approaches these negotiations with:
- Comprehensive evidence packages
- Expert testimony when needed
- Clear documentation of damages
- Understanding of insurance company tactics
- Knowledge of similar case outcomes
- Strong advocacy skills.
The key is having someone who understands both the legal framework and the practical aspects of proving fault percentages.
Get Fair Compensation Within Kansas’s Comparative Negligence System
Understanding comparative negligence in Kansas personal injury cases is important in determining whether you can recover damages and how much you can actually collect. And the math is pretty simple. If you’re awarded $100,000 in damages and you’re 30% at fault, you’ll recover $70,000. If there are multiple defendants, each pays only their share.
Under comparative negligence law, you need to accurately establish the fault percentage in order to present a strong case. To do that, you need a lawyer who understands the system and has experience fighting for just compensation for their clients. With over four decades of experience handling personal injury cases in Kansas, Palmer Law Group knows how to build and present the strongest possible case for its clients.
Contact Palmer Law Group at (785) 233-1836 to discuss your injury case and understand how Kansas comparative negligence laws affect your right to recovery.