Legal & Jurisdiction

Proximate Cause

Proximate cause is the legally recognized primary cause of a loss, the event close enough in the chain of causation to establish liability.

Establishing liability requires showing that a party's action was the proximate cause of the loss, not merely a distant contributing factor. In subrogation, weak proximate cause is a common reason an otherwise promising recovery fails, so reconstructing a clean causal chain from the evidence is central to a defensible claim.