Hawaii Accidents Dictionary

Legal and insurance terms explained plainly

You may see this in a packet from an adoption agency, a court notice, or an email saying a home study must be "completed," "updated," or "approved" before placement. An...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-26

alimony vs spousal support

Insurance adjusters and defense lawyers may bring up a divorce or separation and use "alimony" loosely to suggest a claimant has outside income, reduced household loss, or...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-25

annulment

Miss this distinction, and someone can walk into court expecting a divorce order when what they may need - or be facing - is a ruling that the marriage was never legally valid...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-28

area of impact

The place where people, vehicles, or objects first made contact in a collision. "Place" matters because the area of impact is a location, not just a damaged part. Investigators...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

best interests of the child standard

You'll usually see this phrase in a custody order, divorce papers, a guardian ad litem report, or a lawyer's warning that "the court will decide based on the child's best...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-31

business records exception

$25,000 in medical bills can become much harder to prove if the records that support them are kept out of evidence. A common worst-case problem is assuming hospital charts,...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-21

chemical restraint

Using medication to control a person's behavior or movement rather than to treat a real medical condition is a chemical restraint. In practice, this usually means a nursing...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-23

child custody

Failing to understand who has legal authority over a child can lead to missed court deadlines, violated parenting orders, police involvement during exchanges, or loss of...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-30

child support guidelines

A set of legal rules and formulas used to calculate how much financial support a parent should pay for a child, usually based on each parent's income, the child's needs, and...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-26

class action

Can one lawsuit cover a large group of people who were harmed in the same way? Yes. A class action is a case in which one or several people sue on behalf of a larger group with...

DICTIONARY 2026-04-01

coefficient of friction

You may have seen a line in a crash report, insurance letter, or expert summary that says something like "drag factor/coefficient of friction = 0.70" or "a lower coefficient...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

community property state

Miss this label in a divorce or death case, and a spouse can be pushed into signing away money, a home, retirement funds, or debt without realizing what rules actually apply. A...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-25

consumer expectation test

People often confuse this with the risk-utility test, but they ask different questions. The consumer expectation test looks at whether a product was more dangerous than an...

DICTIONARY 2026-04-02

contested divorce

Miss this distinction, and a divorce that looked routine can turn into a long, expensive court fight over property, support, custody, or even whether the marriage should end on...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-25

crashworthiness doctrine

A maker can be liable when a product did not cause the accident but did make the injuries worse. "Crashworthiness" is most often discussed with vehicles, but the idea reaches...

DICTIONARY 2026-04-01

crush analysis

People often mix this up with crash reconstruction, but they are not the same. Crash reconstruction is the bigger process of figuring out how a collision happened by using...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

delta-v

Not the same thing as vehicle speed, and not a shortcut for saying a crash was "minor" or "major." A car can show limited visible damage and still have a meaningful delta-v,...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

domestic violence protective order

Missing what this means can leave someone dangerously exposed: unwanted contact may continue, the police may have less to enforce right away, and a family court case can get...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-31

elopement

Did a resident leave a care facility without anyone stopping them? That may be elopement - when a person who needs supervision, often because of dementia, confusion, mobility...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-23

enhanced injury

Not every injury that happens in a crash or other accident is an enhanced injury. The usual misunderstanding is that it means the product caused the entire event. It does not....

DICTIONARY 2026-04-02

equitable distribution

Your money, property, debt, and even part of a future payout can turn on this issue fast. In a breakup, equitable distribution is the rule a court uses to divide property and...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-26

event data recorder

A small electronic device built into many vehicles records brief, crash-related information such as speed, braking, seat belt use, throttle position, and changes in force just...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

failure to supervise

When a person or organization has a duty to watch, guide, or protect someone and does not provide the level of oversight that a reasonable situation requires, that can be a...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

general causation

Proof that something can cause a kind of harm. "Can" is the key word. General causation asks whether a product, substance, or condition is capable of causing the injury at...

DICTIONARY 2026-04-03

gouge marks

Deep cuts in the road surface made during a crash. "Deep" matters because these marks go below ordinary tire scuffs or skid marks and usually show that a hard metal part of a...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

guardian ad litem

A guardian ad litem is a person appointed by a court to represent the best interests of a child or an incapacitated person during a specific legal case. Unlike a general...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-30

imputed income for child support

You just got a letter that says the court may use income you are not actually earning to calculate child support. That usually means a judge or child support agency believes...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-25

legal separation

Failing to understand this can leave someone thinking they are basically divorced when they are not - and that mistake can affect money, property, insurance, and even who has...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-23

manufacturing defect

You may see this phrase in a denial letter, an insurance investigation, a repair report, or a lawyer's explanation of why a product failed even though its design looked fine on...

DICTIONARY 2026-04-01

marital property vs separate property

You just got a letter that says the court needs a list of what belongs in the "marital estate" and what does not. That is the basic difference between marital property and...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-28

multidistrict litigation

You may see this in a court notice, a lawyer's letter, or a news update saying your case has been "transferred to an MDL" or "included in coordinated federal proceedings." That...

DICTIONARY 2026-04-01

no-fault divorce

Defense lawyers and insurance adjusters sometimes use the phrase "no-fault" to make people think blame no longer matters at all. In a divorce, that is not what it means. A...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-23

parenting plan

Like a road map for two households, a parenting plan lays out how parents will share the work of raising a child after separation or divorce. It usually covers where the child...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-27

paternity action

Miss this issue, and the fallout can be harsh: a child may go without support, a father may be shut out of custody or visitation, and families can make major decisions based on...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-27

perception-reaction time

The interval between noticing a hazard and taking action in response - such as braking, steering, or sounding a horn - is called perception-reaction time. In crash analysis,...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

photogrammetry

Like using old vacation photos to figure out how tall a building looked or how far apart people were standing, photogrammetry uses pictures or video to measure real-world...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

physical custody vs legal custody

Physical custody is about where a child lives and who handles day-to-day care, while legal custody is about who has authority to make major decisions for the child, such as...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-27

PIP exhaustion

As Hawaii drivers keep feeling higher repair and insurance costs, this phrase comes up more often in adjuster letters: PIP exhaustion means your no-fault medical benefits have...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

point of impact

People constantly mix this up with point of rest, and the difference is not minor. The point of impact is the location where two vehicles, a vehicle and a person, or a vehicle...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

postnuptial agreement

A written contract spouses sign after marriage to set rules about money, property, and debt. "Written" matters because informal promises usually do not hold up when a marriage...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-26

prenuptial agreement

You may have seen language like "the parties agree that property owned before marriage will remain separate" or heard someone say, "sign the prenup before the wedding." That...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-28

pressure ulcer

A pressure ulcer is a bedsore caused by prolonged pressure on the skin. "Pressure" means body weight cutting off blood flow, usually where bone presses against a mattress,...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-23

product recall

Missing a safety warning can leave someone using a dangerous car part, medicine, appliance, or child item long after the maker has learned it may cause fires, crashes,...

DICTIONARY 2026-04-02

rehabilitative alimony

Defense lawyers and insurance companies sometimes grab onto this phrase to argue that someone should be able to "get retrained and get back to work soon," which can be used to...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-31

risk-utility test

You may see this in a denial letter, expert report, or settlement talk as a claim that a product was "not unreasonably dangerous under the risk-utility test." Stripped down,...

DICTIONARY 2026-04-03

scene mapping

You just got a letter that says the insurer is reviewing the crash file and may rely on "scene mapping" to evaluate fault. That usually means a measured layout of the accident...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

sole custody vs joint custody

People often confuse these with physical custody versus legal custody, but those are different questions. Physical custody is where a child lives day to day. Legal custody is...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-23

stepparent adoption

Can a stepparent become a child's legal parent? Yes. Stepparent adoption is the court process that lets a married person adopt their spouse's child and take on the full legal...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-28

strict product liability

Do you have to prove a company was careless to recover for a dangerous product? Not always. Strict product liability allows an injured person to hold a manufacturer,...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-31

temporary alimony

Like scaffolding thrown up before the permanent structure is finished, this is short-term financial support paid by one spouse to the other while a divorce or separation case...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-24

termination of parental rights

Insurance companies or defense lawyers may bring up this phrase to argue that an injured person no longer has a legal parent-child relationship and therefore should not claim...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-28

throw distance

Like measuring how far a dropped tool skids across a workshop floor, the distance a person, vehicle part, or other object travels after impact can help show how much force was...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

time-distance analysis

How do investigators figure out whether a driver had enough time and space to avoid a crash? They use time-distance analysis, a method that compares how fast people or vehicles...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22

uncontested divorce

A divorce is uncontested when both spouses agree on the major terms of ending the marriage, so the case can usually move through court with less conflict, less delay, and fewer...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-29

yaw marks

What are those curved tire marks telling everyone after a crash? They are the arcing streaks a vehicle leaves when it is moving forward but also sliding sideways, usually...

DICTIONARY 2026-03-22