The Kickback and the Penny Taste

The steering wheel didn’t just vibrate; it kicked back like a live thing, a frantic animal trying to escape my grip. Then came the smell-that sharp, metallic tang of an air bag deployment that sits in the back of your throat like pennies. I sat there, the bassline of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ still thumping rhythmically in my head, a loop I couldn’t switch off even as the world turned quiet and grey. My first thought wasn’t about my neck or the crumpled hood of my sedan. It was: ‘I shouldn’t have been reaching for that water bottle.’ In that split second of self-recrimination, I decided I was the villain. I decided I was 108% at fault, a mathematical impossibility fueled by pure, unadulterated guilt.

The law, for all its perceived rigidity, is actually much more comfortable with the messy, grey middle ground than we are.

The Precision Trap: Ruby’s 2-Second Hesitation

I’ve spent 28 years watching people navigate these moments of impact, and the narrative is always the same. They come in with their heads down, apologizing for existing. They think that because they were going 48 miles per hour in a 45 zone, the person who blew a red light and smashed their ribcage gets a free pass. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world, and specifically the New York legal system, actually functions.

She was so convinced of her own ‘failure’ that she didn’t even notice the truck driver was on his phone or that his brake lights were caked in so much mud they were invisible. She almost didn’t call anyone. She almost just ate the $28,000 in medical bills because she felt she didn’t deserve to be ‘made whole.’

The Architecture of ‘Pure’ Comparative Negligence

This is where the doctrine of comparative negligence comes in, and it’s a concept that feels almost counter-intuitive to our ‘all-or-nothing’ brains. In New York, we operate under what’s called ‘pure’ comparative negligence. It’s a beautiful, sophisticated piece of legal architecture.

It’s a recognition that two things can be true at once. You can have made a mistake, and you can still be a victim of someone else’s much larger mistake.

The Value of the Unbiased Numbers

People hate lawyers. I get it. I sometimes hate the industry myself, with its polished teeth and its aggressive billboards. But there is a genuine value in having someone who isn’t drowning in your specific brand of guilt to look at the facts. When Ruby finally reached out to the Siben & Siben personal injury attorneys, she needed someone to point out that while her hesitation was a factor, the truck driver’s negligence was the catalyst.

There’s a strange comfort in the numbers. When you break a tragedy down into percentages, it loses some of its emotional teeth. If you can see that your ‘error’ was only 18% of the total equation, you can stop carrying the 100% weight of the shame. But we resist this. We would rather be ‘completely wrong’ than ‘partially right’ because ‘partially right’ requires us to fight.

Gifting the Discount: The Grocery Store Hazard

I remember talking to a guy who had 58 stitches in his arm from a slip-and-fall. He was walking through a grocery store, and he was looking at his grocery list instead of the floor. He saw the puddle of floor wax, but only when it was too late. He told me, ‘I should have been looking where I was going.’ He was ready to walk away with nothing, ignoring the fact that the store had left a massive, invisible hazard in a high-traffic aisle for 48 minutes without a single warning sign.

He was so focused on his 28% of the blame that he was willing to gift the store a 100% discount on their negligence. It’s absurd when you say it out loud, isn’t it?

Breaking the Chain of Shame

I still have that song stuck in my head. ‘Chain keep us together,’ the lyrics go. It’s ironic, because the chain of events leading to an accident is rarely just one link. It’s a series of 8 or 18 different failures that all happen to converge at the exact same coordinate on a GPS. If you remove the ‘I’m sorry’ from the equation for just a moment, you can start to see the other links. You see the bald tires, the distracted glance, the poorly timed yellow light, the municipality that forgot to trim the hedges blocking the stop sign.

The Elements of the Contract Breach

We live in a shared space. We have a collective contract to look out for one another, and when that contract is breached, the fallout has to be distributed fairly.

Grow Up: Embrace the Percentages

The law doesn’t expect you to be a statue of a saint; it expects you to be a human being navigating a complex world. You can be 28% ‘at fault’ and still be 100% entitled to the help you need to pay your rent, fix your car, and heal your body.