Based on personal injury law in California and generally.
Kids have one job in life and that one job is to be adventurous. Parents have one job in life, too, aside from the job that pays the bills, that is, and that one family related job is to support their children through all attempts at adventurous interaction with the world. Adventure is how kids learn. It’s how they learn what they like to do and what they don’t like to do. It’s how they make friends and find out about others and themselves. It’s also, sometimes, very unfortunately, how they get injured.
If your child has been injured in an accident, you may be wondering about your options. You may have heard, for example, that children cannot make claims and that only people over the age of 18 years can start the process of securing compensation for suffering and associated losses. While this is true, parents and guardians are within their rights to act on behalf of children under the age of 18 years. See a company like these PI lawyers (based out of LA) for more info.
You have three years to begin your claim
Typically, if you wish to begin a claim for personal injury compensation on behalf of your child, the same rules apply in terms of time frames for beginning the claim as would apply to any PI claim that you wished to file for yourself – you must begin the claim within three years of the date of the injury.
There are two very good questions that usually accompany this ‘rule’ for beginning your claim within three years:
1. What if I didn’t know the injury was linked to negligence?
Under certain circumstances, personal injuries may be linked to negligence without anybody realising the link. For example, in the case of COPD, the disease can take many years to be diagnosed, meaning the three year window to begin a claim may have passed. In this case, your ‘date of knowledge’ will be taken into account, often resetting your three year deadline to the point at which you knew negligence was linked to the injury.
2. What if I was injured as a child and nobody claimed on my behalf?
Sometimes, children suffer injuries in childhood that may affect them physically or mentally (or both), and no parent or guardian begins a claim on their behalf. In this case – depending on where you are in the world – quite often the child has a three year time frame in which to begin the claim from the date of becoming an adult on their 18th birthday. The rules over the ‘date of knowledge’ also apply to this scenario, meaning claims for childhood injuries may be brought many years after the date on which the original injury actually took place. Always seek further information from those experienced in the field if you are unsure. Do your research.
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