Legal Definitions - direct cause

Direct Cause

A direct cause refers to an event or action that immediately and straightforwardly leads to a particular outcome or injury, without any significant intervening events breaking the chain between the initial action and the final result. It is the unbroken link between what someone did (or failed to do) and the harm that occurred, making the outcome a natural and foreseeable consequence of the initial act.

Here are some examples illustrating direct cause:

• Example 1: Automobile Accident

  A driver, distracted by their phone, swerves into the wrong lane and collides head-on with an oncoming vehicle. The occupants of the second vehicle suffer injuries and their car is totaled.

  In this scenario, the distracted driver's act of swerving into the wrong lane is the direct cause of the collision, the injuries to the other occupants, and the damage to their vehicle. There were no other significant events that broke the immediate connection between the driver's action and the resulting harm.

• Example 2: Property Damage

  A construction worker accidentally drops a heavy tool from a scaffold, and it falls directly onto a newly installed skylight, shattering the glass and causing water to leak into the building during a subsequent rain shower.

  The construction worker dropping the tool is the direct cause of the skylight shattering. The broken skylight then directly led to the water damage. The chain of events from the dropped tool to the broken glass and subsequent leak is immediate and unbroken.

• Example 3: Business Loss

  A company's IT department fails to install critical security updates on its servers despite repeated warnings. As a result, the company's network is easily breached by hackers, leading to a significant data theft and a subsequent loss of customer trust and revenue.

  The IT department's failure to install the security updates is the direct cause that allowed the network breach to occur. This breach, in turn, directly caused the data theft and the subsequent financial and reputational damage to the company. The lack of updates created a direct vulnerability that was exploited.