Time Limits for Bringing a Case: The "Statute of Limitations"
Under a legal rule known as the "statute of limitations," any lawsuit arising from an accident or injury must be filed within a certain time limit or the injured person's legal claim will be barred and his or her right to sue will be lost forever. Every state has enacted its own statute of limitations, requiring any personal injury suit be filed in court within a set time after the incident or injury. The specific limit prescribed by each state ranges from one year (in Kentucky and Tennessee) to six years (in Maine and North Dakota).
In some states, the type of personal injury claim may also affect the time limit. For example, certain defamation cases and claims involving minors (persons under age 18) may be granted longer time limits, while medical malpractice statutes of limitations may grant shorter time limits. Typically, the statute of limitations in a lawsuit for injuries to a minor does not begin to run until he or she reaches the age of 18. For example, suppose Pat is injured in a car accident on his 17th birthday. In a state that has a two-year statute of limitations for personal injury lawsuits, Pat will have three years to file suit for injuries suffered in that accident.
The "Discovery of Harm" Rule
While a statute of limitations may declare that a personal injury lawsuit must be filed within a certain amount of time after an accident or injury, that time period usually does not begin to run until the moment when the person filing suit knew (or should reasonably have known) that they had suffered harm, and the nature of that harm. An example of this "discovery of harm" rule is a medical malpractice claim in which a surgeon mistakenly left a temporary bandage in the abdomen of a patient, but the error was not discovered until years later, during another surgical procedure. In such a case, the patient had no reason to know of what happened, and this lack of knowledge could not be called unreasonable under the circumstances. Most likely, the statute of limitations would not begin to run until the day on which the first surgeon's mistake was "discovered" by the patient, rather than from the day on which the first surgeon actually made the mistake.
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