A negligence claim in Georgia generally rests on four elements: a duty of care, a breach of that duty, causation, and damages. Each must be present, and the analysis moves through them in turn.
First comes the duty. The defendant must have owed the injured person a legal duty to exercise reasonable care, which arises from the relationship or circumstances between them. A driver owes other motorists such a duty; a store owes its customers one as well.
Breach and causation form the middle. Breach means a careful person would have acted differently than the defendant did, and causation ties that failure to the injury that followed. A lapse that harmed no one, or harm the lapse did not bring about, leaves these two elements unmet.
Damages complete the claim. Georgia compensates actual harm, not risky conduct alone, so a driver who runs a red light but strikes no one has breached a duty without completing a claim. Without resulting injury, there is nothing for the law to redress.
The four elements of negligence in Georgia are duty, breach, causation, and damages. Each must hold for the claim to stand, and the absence of any one is generally enough to defeat it. Of the four, breach and causation tend to draw the most dispute, since a defendant rarely contests that some duty existed and damages are often plain, leaving the contest over whether the conduct fell short and whether it caused the harm.