Rules that decide what happens to a claim when the injured person was also partly careless - and they differ sharply from state to state.
These are the rules that answer a very common question: what if the injured person was partly at fault too? States answer it in three broadly different ways, and which answer applies is a matter of where the case is brought rather than what happened.
Under pure comparative rules, an injured person's recovery is reduced by their own share of the fault, however large that share is. Under modified comparative rules, recovery is reduced the same way but disappears entirely once the injured person's share crosses a threshold. Under contributory negligence rules, which only a small number of jurisdictions still follow, any fault at all on the injured person's part can bar the claim completely.
The practical effect is that the same accident, with the same facts and the same share of blame, can be worth a reduced amount in one state and nothing at all in another.
This is worth asking a lawyer about early, because it is the doctrine most likely to make a claim worth far less than it first appears - or worth nothing. An insurer's first argument is very often that the injured person was partly responsible, and how much that argument matters depends entirely on which of the three rules the state follows.
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