LAWYER HELPLINE: ☎ 855 804 7142

There are over 500,000 motor vehicle collisions in Canada every year which cause almost 250,000 people to be injured, over 20,000 of which are critical injuries of which about 3,000 are fatalities. There are about 8 deaths every day on Canadian roads and there is a serious injury every 2 minutes resulting in over 100,000 claims for compensation ever year in Canada. If you would like to talk to a Oshawa car accident lawyer without further obligation then just use the helpline or send the contact form or email our offices and a Oshawa car accident lawyer who deals exclusively in personal injury accident claims will speak to you with free advice and information on how best to preserve your legal rights to compensation for your injuries.

 

Oshawa Car Accident Lawyer - Negligence

 

If you find yourself in an accident or have suffered some kind of injury and that injury leads to definable personal losses, you might want to hire an Oshawa car accident lawyer to make certain the incident wasn’t really an accident and was instead the product of the behavior of someone else. If someone else is to blame for the incident, the lawyer must look for and prove the existence of “negligence” before he or she can ask for compensation for your losses.

Negligence can be shown in cases where a person, corporation, or governmental agency acted in such a way as to be something no reasonable person would do. It needs to be behavior that is out of the ordinary and something that, if the injurer were reasonable, he or she would not have done. Establishing negligence requires that the Oshawa car accident lawyer knows exactly what a reasonable person would have done.

In addition, in order to show negligence, the lawyer must show that a duty of care existed between the injurer and the injured. This means that in a medical malpractice case, the physician owes a duty of care to his patients so that no harm can come to them because of his or her actions. The airline company owes a duty of care to its passengers to make sure they travel safely and arrive at their destination without injury or death.

Secondly, the Oshawa car accident lawyer must show that, in the case of the incident, there existed a breach of the duty of care. A breach of the duty of care implies that something about the injurer’s behavior that was below acceptable standards. For example, a railroad company who caused an accident because of poor policies or inability to follow its policies would be considered to have exhibited a breach of their duty of care to its passengers.

Lastly, losses need to be demonstrated by the lawyer. Losses might be as simple as the cost to repair a car or as complicated as losses related to alienation of affection because of the incident. Losses must exist before a claim can be made against the injurer. Losses take many forms, as you will see.

The compensation claim represents the monetary losses you experienced regarding the incident and other losses that usually have no monetary value. Punitive damages are also included in the claim if the behavior of the injurer was malicious or otherwise egregious in nature.

There are three parts to a claim: special damages, general damages, and punitive damages. Special damages are those losses that have an innate monetary value. Hospital and doctor costs, costs to replace or repair a vehicle and the cost of lost wages or future lost wages are included in this part of the damages.

General damages are more ethereal because they have no innate monetary value. With general damages, the cost of the losses must be estimated by the lawyer and include things like the loss of ability to advance in one’s career, the loss of ability to perform a hobby, the loss of ability to do activities of daily living and the losses incurred in pain and suffering.

Punitive damages, as mentioned, are basically “punishment damages” and are not always a part of a claim. Punitive damages are a way to punish the injurer for behavior that was particularly in bad taste.

When the claim has been created, it is filed before the court system. The case may go to trial. Alternatively, the lawyers on all sides may get together to hammer out a claim that is satisfactory to the parties involved.

LAWYER HELPLINE: ☎ 855 804 7142