·         Each person is responsible for providing a duty of care to all those around them-.

·         A ‘duty of care’ is a responsibility to take reasonable steps to avoid causing injury or damage to your neighbours or their property.

·         Your ‘neighbour’ in a legal sense is anyone who may be foreseeably harmed by your activities or inactivity.

·         The law considers an individual’s duty of care through the lens of a reasonable person. This means the court will look at the factual circumstances of any given accident and ask what a reasonable person taking care of those around them would have done in the circumstances.

·         In certain circumstances your responsibility or liability for an accident or injury may be limited because:

o   the risk of injury should have been obvious to the party who was injured;

o   the risk of injury to the other party could not have been avoided even with reasonable care and skill; or

o   a warning about the risk was provided by you.

·         To bring an action before the court you must be able to prove that you were a person to whom a duty of care was owed. You must also be able to show the court that the injuries sustained by you were a result of the accident.

·         As the person claiming that a duty of care owed to you has been breached the onus will be on you to prove your case to the court ‘on the balance of probabilities.’ This is the standard of proof needed to determine whether there is enough evidence to support your allegation of wrong-doing against the other party.

·         You can find more information about this in our topics on Negligence & Torts and Civil Litigation.