Ottawa Car Accident Lawyer - Personal Injury Compensation Claim

LAWYER HELPLINE: ☎ 855 804 7142


Personal Injury Lawyers

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 an Ottawa car accident lawyer without further obligation then just use the helpline or send the contact form or email our offices and an Ottawa 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.

 

Ottawa Car Accident Lawyer - Negligence

 

The term negligence is a fairly easy legal term to grasp once you know the elements of the state. Negligence comes into play in situations such as an accident or injury—perhaps an injury on the job or at a grocery store. While it’s true that accidents do just happen, there are some situations where the condition of negligence is involved.

Negligence is defined as doing an act or failing to do an act that a normal, reasonable person would do to prevent or forestall an injury or accident to another person. The key point is that the negligent person did something that no reasonable person would have done. It is sometimes up to the lawyers, the judge and the jury to determine what exactly constitutes a “reasonable person”.

The individual who caused the accident or injury must have owed the victim in the case a “duty of care”. This is just a fancy way of saying that the offending person must have some responsibility into the welfare of the victim. In fact, we, as motorists, owe a duty of care to every other motorist on the road not to drive in such a way as to cause an accident. A nursing home employee owes a duty of care to the resident so that the resident has good health and positive experience during their stay.

Those who breach that duty of care are considered negligent. Breaching the duty of care means that the offending individual’s actions were somehow substandard or less than acceptable giving the situation. A doctor who performs a sloppy surgery is providing substandard care and is therefore breaching the duty of care regarding their patient.

Finally, in order for an Ottawa car accident lawyer to draw up a compensation claim against the offending person (also known as the defendant), the lawyer must show that the victim in the accident or injury suffered some type of loss. If a person, for example, slips and falls on the floor of the grocery store but comes away with no acute injury, there is no real loss except for the minimal pain and suffering he or she may have experienced. Without a substantial loss, there is no lawsuit in the matter.

When an Ottawa car accident lawyer attempts to show loss, he or she looks for the presence of at least one of two things: “special damages” and “general damages”. In the case of special damages, all the lawyer needs to do is to add up the monetary losses suffered by the victim. A monetary loss can be something like lost wages due to the injury or medical bills suffered by the patient due to the injury. These things are fairly simple to calculate. General losses are harder to calculate because they have no innate monetary value. These things include the value of pain and suffering and the value of the loss of affection of a loved one that can be shown to be directly related to the injury.

A claim is the sum of the special damages and whatever the Ottawa car accident lawyer decides is the value of the general damages. A claim can be the total of the expenses to repair or replace a car, rental car expenses, medical expenses, lost wages from the time the person was injured to the time of the legal settlement or court settlement, future loss of wages—perhaps for the rest of the victim’s life. It can also include the cost of disability equipment, the cost of a nurse or aide to care for the victim or even the loss of ability to perform a hobby or the activities of daily living.

The lawyer for the victim must remember that there is going to be a statute of limitations on the case. The statute of limitations gives the lawyer for the victim only so many years to file the claim before the ability to do so becomes denied.

LAWYER HELPLINE: ☎ 855 804 7142