If you decide you want to sue someone, then usually, you don’t do it lightly. Maybe you feel you must take this action because you have no other choice. Occasionally you might have someone who likes to sue people because they’re particularly litigious, but that’s a relative rarity.
Typically, you’ll see you have a certain amount of time during which you can legally sue someone. The courts call this the statute of limitations.
Personal injury cases usually have a two-year limitations statute, though that can vary if certain factors come into play. You may wonder about that statute of limitations. Why does it exist?
We will talk about that right now. If you think about it, several valid reasons make statutes of limitations sensible and useful things to have in modern society, particularly when you’re talking about the personal injury niche.
The Law Doesn’t Want You to Sue Someone Many Years After the Fact
If you want to sue someone, the legal system would prefer that you do it promptly. They don’t want someone to sue a person or company twenty years after they feel that individual or business entity harmed them.
If no statute of limitations existed, then a person could sue a driver who hit them with their car decades later. That wouldn’t make much sense. A person could sue a company that made a product they allege harmed them decades later as well. By that time, maybe the company long since stopped making that product, or perhaps it even went out of business.
With a statute of limitations in place, it incentivizes suing a person or company you allege harmed you relatively promptly. It forces people to make these decisions instead of giving them an unlimited amount of time.
A Statue of Limitations Preserves the Evidence
A statute of limitations tries to keep things fair for both a person who alleges that another individual or company harmed them, and also for that person or business entity who stands accused. By having a statute of limitations, it ensures that evidence does not fade or erode if a person tries to sue someone many years after the alleged incident.
In time, physical evidence fades. If someone alleges that a product a company made harmed them, for instance, then they may need to prove it by showing that product has a design flaw. If you are trying to prove your case with a twenty-year-old product, though, maybe the intervening time will erode that product to the point that proving or disproving it harmed you can’t realistically happen anymore.
Maybe your case also requires that you bring an eyewitness to the stand. If your lawyer calls this eyewitness and asks them questions about an incident that happened a couple of months before, they probably still have a pretty reliable memory of it. If you call someone to the stand decades later and ask them about something they supposedly saw, though, there is only a minimal chance they can remember it with any real accuracy.
You Need to Give Potential Defendants Finality
Let us say someone driving hits another car. The driver they hit thinks about suing, but then decides that they won’t. The driver who causes the accident will likely feel a sense of relief. They will know that they do not have a potential lawsuit hanging over their head anymore once the statute of limitations the state imposes passes.
If no such statute of limitations existed, then that potential lawsuit would hang over the responsible driver’s head forever. Imagine if you made a driving mistake and hit another car in your teens. Then, someone comes back and sues you for injuries or vehicle damages when you are in your forties.
It is a somewhat ridiculous concept, but that could easily happen if a statute of limitations did not prevent it. Also, there is an added element that bears thinking about.
If the original plaintiff dies, someone in their family could still sue a person they deem responsible. They could legally do that if they have not passed the statute of limitations.
Incredible as it may sound, if no statute of limitations existed, the adult offspring of a driver you hit with your car decades ago could still sue you. It sounds absurd, but people could file lawsuits on the behalf of the deceased if they felt justified in doing so, and that kind of thing would most likely happen.
Court Efficiency Must Factor in as Well
There is one final factor that we must consider in these cases. Society ostensibly has a court system set up to serve the people. That is true with both criminal cases and civil ones.
If no statute of limitations existed for personal injury cases, then a backlog of cases might form that no court could ever handle. If people could sue private citizens or companies for things that happened many decades before, we would have to create many more courts to even try to get to all of those cases in a reasonable timeframe.
If you consider all this, it becomes obvious why the court system needs to have laws in place that govern how long someone has to sue. Statutes of limitations serve an important function. It is not a perfect system, but it is probably the one that makes the most sense.
That is why, if you think you might sue someone, you need to weigh all the critical factors during the time the law gives you. This way, you can make a final decision to do it or not before the time elapses.
You even have stipulations regarding statutes of limitations that help you in unusual circumstances. For example, you usually get a longer decision period if you’re in a coma following an accident and can’t decide whether to sue someone or not during that time. It’s these kinds of caveats that make statutes of limitations as fair as possible.