Drive with Duty, Avoid Negligence
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Video Transcribed: I’m Oklahoma personal injury lawyer, Mike Ashworth. Today, we’re going to talk about breach of duty. What is a duty? In order to have a case of what we call negligence where someone has done something wrong, they have to breach a duty. Now, when you’re driving a car, we all have a duty. As a matter of fact, that is defined by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in what we call a jury instruction. Under the OUJI, Oklahoma Uniform Jury Instruction, you can go and read all the laws the judge will give to a jury and it helps you understand the law much better. Today, we’re going to talk about one specific instruction. This is OUJI 10.1 called General Duty of Drivers and Pedestrians.
It says the law is, “It is the duty of the driver of a motor vehicle and a pedestrian to use ordinary care to prevent injury to themselves or other persons.” What does that mean? Well, they’re supposed to be reasonable. They’re supposed to follow the law. We have what we call the rules of the road. If somebody is in a crosswalk and they’ve looked both ways and they’re in the crosswalk and they get hit, have they used ordinary care? Yes, they probably have. But if they dart out into the middle of the street, is that ordinary care? Well, the jurors could say no, it’s their fault or at least partly their fault. Same thing for a driver. What happens if the driver does not use ordinary care? Now, the thing about ordinary care is you have a right to expect other people to be using ordinary care. You don’t have to be paranoid and sit there lurking about looking everywhere with cameras on the 360-degree sides of your car. Just use ordinary care.
So if you have a question about ordinary care, if you have a question about anything to do with the law even if you just want to sit there and get an idea, call us. It’s worth a call. Call Wirth, Wirth Law Firm. I’m available. We’ve got some professional people, a lot of professional lawyers here. As a matter of fact, they’re all professionals at what they do. They do it very, very well. So just give us a call. You can reach me, a Tulsa car accident attorney, at tulsapersonalinjurylawyer.pro or you can go to makelaweasy.com because that’s our job. We want to make the law easy for you. We don’t want you to fret. That’s what we get paid to do. So give us a call if you have any questions at all and we’ll get you heading in the right direction.
