It seems like once is enough.

Someone isn't paying attention. They rear-end you. Your car is damaged and has to be repaired. It's inconvenient to deal with the body shop and rent another vehicle.

More importantly, your body is injured. It feels like a second full-time job to manage your treatment. Just about everything in your life has turned upside down.

Things start getting back to normal. Or at least a new normal. And then it happens again.

I cannot tell you how many of our clients are involved in successive collisions.

In some cases there are clearly separate harms. In one wreck the injured person hurts their head. In the other they hurt their foot.

But in most cases there’s overlap. The same body part is injured or the same harm is caused.

When that happens, the defendants have the burden of trying to segregate the damages.

And if the harm from each wreck can’t be apportioned, each defendant is subject to liability for the entire harm.

Here’s how the courts explain it:

“Once a plaintiff has proved that each successive negligent defendant has caused some damage, the burden of proving allocation of those damages among themselves is upon the defendants; if the jury find[s] that the harm is indivisible, then the defendants are jointly and severally liable for the entire harm.”

[The term “jointly and severally” means that each defendant is responsible for the whole enchilada.]

It’s so important for injured people and their doctors to know how the law works in Washington. Injured people don’t have to agonize about how to separate the inseparable. Providers don’t have to go through medical contortions to allocate injuries and harms that can’t be allocated.

If you’re injured in a second wreck don’t freak out.

Seek the treatment you need for symptoms you still had before the second wreck and new symptoms you’ve had since the second wreck.

The insurance issues will sort themselves out. Doctors know (or should know) how to get paid. Just focus on getting better.