The limitations on damages and the effects on determining liability for failure to wear a helmet will vary depending on several factors such as the state’s motorcycle helmet laws and whether the cyclist was wearing a helmet at the time of the accident. However, even if your state does not have mandatory helmet laws, whether you wore a helmet or not may affect the damages you collect and the determination of liability.
If you did not sustain head or neck injuries and were not wearing a helmet, then the helmet would not be relevant to your injury claim. However, if you wore a helmet, it may have shown that you were a responsible motorcyclist. Again, this would be the same whether or not your state has a mandatory helmet law.
If at the time of the accident you were not wearing a helmet and you sustained head and neck injuries, it may be difficult to recover damages. The challenge is the same whether or not your state has a mandatory helmet law. The argument will be that your failure to wear a helmet contributed to the severity of your head and neck injuries.
In legal terms, you may be found to be contributory negligent, which essentially means that you are partially responsible for the type of injuries that you sustained. The only way to overcome this burden is to prove that you would have sustained the same injury if you had been wearing a helmet. This is often very difficult to prove since insurance adjusters have an enormous amount of information supporting the claim that helmets can significantly reduce injuries in the event of an accident.
However, if you are found to be partly responsible for your injuries, you may still recover damages for them. Typically, the insurance adjuster will assign a percentage of blame. In other words, you may be 20 percent responsible for your injuries because you neglected to wear a helmet. Your damages would be reduced by that percentage.
There are other factors that may reduce your damages award. Sometimes an award is reduced for a plaintiff’s failure to mitigate their damages. For example, if a doctor instructed you to go to physical therapy and you did not go, and as a result you now need surgery to correct the injury, the cost of the surgery would not be award because your actions caused the amount of damages to increase.
While you may be able to prove that your injuries would be the same had you worn a helmet, this is a difficult burden to overcome and often requires an experienced personal injury attorney. A personal injury attorney will have access to experts that have studied the effects of helmets in accident cases and have testified in court to this issue. With the assistance of an experienced personal injury attorney, you are more likely to receive a higher award than if you tried to negotiate with the insurance company on your own.