Personal injury law covers any harm done to a person’s body or mind — as opposed to harm done to property, which is governed by different legal rules. It’s a broad area of law that includes everything from a single-car accident to a nationwide defective drug case affecting thousands of people.
Our personal injury lawyers handle both ends of that spectrum: individual injury claims and large-scale class actions and mass torts against corporations whose products or conduct caused widespread harm. Below, we explain the basics — including the difference between an individual lawsuit and a class action — so you know what kind of case you may have.
What Is Personal Injury Law?
In its simplest form, “personal injury” means you or a dependent got hurt, and someone else should be held responsible. There are many ways this can happen — a car crash, a defective product, a doctor error — and the way you were hurt determines which subcategory of law applies to your claim (negligence, medical malpractice, product liability, and so on).
Every personal injury case shares the same core issue: someone was harmed, and someone else is legally responsible for it. Your personal injury attorney figures out which laws apply — you just need to be able to explain what happened and who you believe is responsible.
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Personal Injury Examples
Cases We’ve Handled
Personal injury takes many forms. Below are examples drawn from our firm’s own cases and investigations, showing the range of harm that can give rise to a personal injury claim.
Example 1: Wildfire Injury and Wrongful Death
When a utility company’s equipment sparks a wildfire, it can be held liable for the injuries, property loss, and deaths that result. Our attorneys represent survivors and families in the Eaton Fire Lawsuit against Southern California Edison. To date, our firm has recovered more than $1.5 billion for clients in fire and disaster cases and represented over 6,300 wildfire survivors across California.
Example 2: Dangerous Drug Injury
Pharmaceutical companies can be held liable when a drug causes injuries it failed to adequately warn about. We currently represent individuals diagnosed with meningioma — a type of brain or spinal tumor — after long-term use of the birth control injection Depo-Provera, in the Depo-Provera Lawsuits for Meningioma Brain Tumors. This kind of case is typically litigated as a mass tort, since each person’s injury and damages differ even though the underlying drug and defect are the same. (See “Class Actions vs. Individual Personal Injury Lawsuits” below.)
Our personal injury attorneys have been court-appointed to leadership roles in large-scale litigation representing individuals harmed by Tylenol, the chemotherapy drug Taxotere, the pain medication Vioxx, the birth control medications Yaz and Yasmin, and more.
Example 3: Social Media and Technology Addiction
Personal injury isn’t limited to physical harm — it also covers psychological and developmental harm. Our attorneys represent over 500 children, teens, and families in the Social Media Addiction Lawsuits against TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms, alleging that these companies designed addictive features that harmed young users. Andre Mura and Michael Weinkowitz were court-appointed to the leadership team overseeing thousands of related TikTok Addiction Lawsuits.
Example 4: Abuse by a Medical Provider
Institutions have a duty to protect patients from known risks — including from their own staff. Our attorneys represented over 5,500 former patients of ex-UCLA OB-GYN Dr. James Heaps in a class action alleging assault, abuse, and harassment, and that UCLA failed to protect his patients even after becoming aware of the misconduct. The case settled for $73 million, with UCLA also agreeing to overhaul its policies for identifying, preventing, and reporting sexual misconduct.
Example 5: Child Sexual Exploitation
Companies that operate platforms used by children have a responsibility to protect them from foreseeable harm. Families nationwide have brought the Roblox Child Grooming & Sexual Exploitation Lawsuit, alleging that the gaming platform failed to prevent the grooming and sexual exploitation of its child users.
Personal Injury Lawsuit Statistics
The most recent national study of tort trials, conducted by The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that roughly 16,400 personal injury cases go to trial each year — only about 4% of all personal injury lawsuits filed. Extrapolating from that figure, there are approximately 410,000 personal injury lawsuits filed annually in the United States that settle or are otherwise resolved before trial.
For context, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that in 2024 there were about 1.68 million injury crashes on U.S. roads, injuring 2.42 million people, and 39,254 people died in traffic crashes.
Personal Injury Definition
Restatement of the Law Second, Torts — a source many courts rely on — defines “personal injury” as the invasion of any legally protected interest of another. Under this definition, an “injury” can occur even without a tangible “harm” (defined as a tangible, material detriment). Trespassing, for instance, is a legal injury even if the property is undamaged — and defamation is a personal injury even though it harms only a person’s dignity, not their body.
The legal definition of “injury” may differ from how the term is commonly used today. The modern usage of “personal injury” is generally to refer to lawsuits where a person has suffered a physical harm.
Personal Injury Law Basics
Most personal injury lawsuits fall under “tort law.” The main categories include:
- Negligence – Everyone owes others a duty of reasonable care. When someone breaches that duty and it causes harm, the injured person has a negligence claim. Most negligence is unintentional — the result of carelessness, not malice.
- Medical Malpractice – A negligence claim against a doctor or other medical provider. Because these cases often produced large jury verdicts, they’ve been a central target of “tort reform” efforts to cap damages. Arizona is a notable exception — it does not cap damages in Arizona medical malpractice cases.
- Product Defect – Injuries caused by a poorly designed product (a “design defect”). Strict liability cases involve products that are inherently dangerous and likely to cause injury, such as dynamite.
- Failure to Warn — A manufacturer’s failure to disclose known risks of a product.
- Mass torts — Numerous individually filed lawsuits arising from the same product or event, often coordinated before one court. (See below for how this differs from a class action.)Intentional torts — Harm caused on purpose, such as assault.
Class Actions vs. Individual Personal Injury Lawsuits
Not every personal injury case looks the same. Some involve a single person harmed in a single incident — a car accident, a fall, a dog bite. Others involve a defective drug, product, or corporate practice that harms thousands of people in the same way. The law treats these two situations very differently, and understanding which one applies to you affects how your case is filed, how long it takes, and how compensation is calculated.
Individual Personal Injury (Tort) Claims
Most personal injury cases are individual, or “tort,” claims: one injured person (the plaintiff) suing one or more responsible parties (the defendant) over a specific incident. Car accidents, slip and falls, dog bites, and most medical malpractice cases fall into this category.
In an individual claim:
- You file an individual lawsuit and control your own case.
- Compensation is calculated based on your specific injuries, medical bills, lost wages, and pain and suffering — no one else’s damages affect your recovery.
An individual claim is the right path when your injury is unique to your circumstances, even if other people have been hurt in similar ways by the same general hazard (for example, two different slip-and-fall injuries at two different stores aren’t related, even though they involve the same type of accident).
Personal Injury Class Actions & Mass Torts
When a single product, drug, or corporate practice injures a large number of people in a similar way, those cases are usually too numerous — and too similar — to litigate one at a time. Depending on the facts, they proceed as either a class action or a mass tort, and the two work differently:
- Class actions are representative lawsuits. A small number of named plaintiffs sue on behalf of an entire “class” of people who were harmed the same way. Class members are automatically included unless they affirmatively opt out, and any settlement or verdict applies to the whole class.
- Mass torts involve individually filed lawsuits — each injured person has their own case — that are coordinated before a single court (often through multidistrict litigation, or an “MDL”) to resolve shared questions of fact efficiently. Unlike a class action, you generally need to file your own claim to recover.
We’ve represented plaintiffs nationwide in mass tort and class action litigation against pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, and other corporations whose products caused widespread harm — including the cases below.
Our Personal injury attorneys can help you figure out which option is right for you.
Our Personal Injury Law Practice: Class Action & Mass Tort Results
| Case | Recovery |
| Actos & Bladder Cancer | $2.37 billion for claimants nationwide who developed bladder cancer after taking Actos diabetes drugs |
| Yaz & Blood Clots | $1.6 billion for claimants nationwide who suffered blood clots, strokes, and other injuries after taking Yaz, Yasmin, and Ocella birth control pills |
| Pradaxa & Internal Bleeding | $650 million for claimants nationwide who suffered internal bleeding after taking Pradaxa blood thinners |
| Medtronic Defibrillator Recall | $75 million for claimants nationwide impacted by a heart defibrillator recall |
Talk to an attorney about your personal injury case →
Frequently Asked Questions About Personal Injury Law
About Us
Gibbs Mura is a California-based law firm committed to protecting the rights of clients nationwide who have been harmed by corporate misconduct. We represent individuals, whistleblowers, employees, and small businesses across the U.S. against the world’s largest corporations. Our award-winning lawyers have achieved landmark recoveries and billions of dollars for our clients in high-stakes class action and individual cases involving consumer protection, data breach, digital privacy, and federal and California employment lawsuits.
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