When Can You Bring a Personal Injury Suit on Someone Else’s Behalf?

However, many people don’t know when or if they can sue a person or business entity on someone else’s behalf. You can, but only in very particular circumstances. We will talk about some of those right now.

What Does Personal Injury Entail?

Before we dive into when you can represent someone else when filing a lawsuit, let’s quickly define personal injury law. This aspect of the legal system deals with lawsuits resulting from damage that a person or company inflicts. However, to collect any money, you must usually prove this person or entity caused the damages you allege occurred.

You might sue for a slip-and-fall in a store or on the premises of some other business entity. You can file a medical malpractice suit against a doctor or hospital if you feel they harmed you. You must file medical malpractice claims within two years in most instances. You’re often looking at the same timeline for other non-medical personal injury suits.

 
Dog bite situations sometimes bring lawsuits, as do instances where you injured yourself in someone’s home. In these situations, you might sue if you feel the individual who owns the property knew about a hazardous situation, but they didn’t correct it. Product liability lawsuits also fall into the personal injury category.
Now, let’s discuss some situations where you can sue a person or entity on someone else’s behalf.

When You’re Representing a Child

Let’s imagine a scenario for a moment. You buy your child a toy, which immediately malfunctions and injures them. The toy hurts them severely. You have to pay the medical bills while your child recovers. Maybe they even need surgery, physical therapy, or medication following the incident.

 
That’s a situation where you can certainly sue the company that made the toy. The child can’t do it on their own behalf. They’re not 18 yet. An individual can only legally sue a person or entity on their own behalf once the court system considers them to be legally an adult.

In these cases, if you win money for your child, you can use it to cover the medical bills associated with their injury. If you have money left over, you might also hold the cash until the child becomes an adult. Then, they can figure out what to do with the rest of it.

When You’re Representing Someone in a Coma

You might also represent someone and sue a person or entity on their behalf if they’re alive, but they can’t do it themselves. There’s an obvious time this occurs. If someone lapses into a coma, and you’re certain a person or business entity caused their condition, you can bring a lawsuit since they can’t do it.

 
Imagine if you’re in a vehicle with your spouse, and another driver plows into you. Your spouse, in the passenger’s seat, takes the brunt of the impact. The car rolls over a few times. Your spouse sustains a serious head injury. They lapse into a coma.

Doctors still don’t know a whole lot about comas, even after studying them for many years. Someone might wake up from one after a week, a month, several years, or never. The doctors can monitor someone’s brain activity in a coma to a certain extent, but that doesn’t necessarily reveal whether they’ll ever wake up.

 
In such a situation, maybe you find out the driver who hit your vehicle consumed alcohol before they drove. The breathalyzer they took at the scene shows they were far over the legal limit. They will probably face criminal charges, but you can bring a civil lawsuit as well on your spouse’s behalf.

When You’re Representing Someone with Their Expressed Permission

You might also represent someone and bring a civil action against a person or entity with someone’s expressed permission. Maybe you have a relative who’s alive and conscious, but they’re immobile.

 
Perhaps they’re in hospice care, for instance. They might appear in court via a live feed by using Zoom or Skype, but maybe they can’t even do that. They’re too weak.

They can sign documentation indicating they’ll let you sue on their behalf. These cases frequently involve many legal complications, but they do occur sometimes.

 
You must speak to a lawyer to see whether you can do this for someone in your life. Usually, you must have explicit permission to bring a civil action on their behalf, and you must also have ironclad proof that a person or entity harmed them.

When You’re Representing Someone Who Died

You might also bring a civil action against a person or entity if they killed someone important to you. The car crash scenario may apply here as well if the drunk driver killed your spouse, child, or some other relative instead of putting them in a coma.

 
If you bring a civil case like this, the legal system calls that a wrongful death suit. These situations can play out in court over days or weeks, but they seldom get that far.

 
Instead, the responsible party might offer you a settlement. They will likely do that if you and your lawyer can show during the discovery phase that you have plenty of evidence proving that this person or business entity killed your relative.

 
If the defendant feels you don’t have enough evidence, they might contest the lawsuit in court. That’s risky, though. The standard of proof in civil cases doesn’t usually have such a strict definition when you compare it to proof a prosecutor must produce in criminal cases. If the jury feels the defendant caused your relative's death, they might make them pay millions.