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

 

Vancouver Car Accident Lawyer - Negligence

 

The concept of negligence is a legal one and often comes up in cases where an accident or other type of injury has occurred and an individual has become injured or killed. The question of the Vancouver car accident lawyer in this type of situation is whether or not the incident occurred as a result of a complete accident or if the actions and behaviors of an individual, corporation, industry or government agency had something to do with the accident or injury—whether or not the party’s action actually was the cause of the victim’s condition.

Negligence requires special features in order to be called negligence. As a definition, one can define negligence as performing an action or perhaps not performing a needed action that a reasonable person would not have done. An action performed by the offending person is called an act of commission. An action that was a failure to act in such a way as to avoid the incident is called an act of omission. In either case, the behavior has to be something that reasonable persons would not do.

In order to prove negligence, the Vancouver car accident lawyer must demonstrate that a “duty of care” existed in the situation. A good explanation of duty of care is having the responsibility over the care and well-being of another person. This can show up in several settings. For example, as a motorist, you have the duty of care to make sure your driving is up to a standard where you can avoid injury to every other motorist on the road. Airline companies owe a duty of care to every passenger and, in having this duty of care, must act in such a way as to assure all passengers reach their destination safely.

Negligence also requires that there be a breach of the duty of care somehow. It means that the behavior of the party must not be substandard and must not fall below normal standards of care. Standards of care can be difficult to determine in all cases. In the case of motor vehicle accident, the presence of a motor vehicle violation on the part of the offending party shows substandard behavior but is interestingly not a necessity in legal cases attempting to show breach of duty of care.

In order for the negligence to mean something, the Vancouver car accident lawyer needs to show that the victim in the accident or injury showed some kind of loss. The loss can be easily calculated, such as the cost of medical care or it can be more nebulous, such as the losses experienced in having pain and suffering from the incident.

Once the Vancouver car accident lawyer has shown that negligence and losses existed, they must assemble a claim to take to the court outlining the monetary request the Plaintiff is making. They do this by combining the value of “special damages” with the value of “general damages”. Special damages are those that have a simple method of determining the value of. Things like the value of lost wages and the cost to repair a car are considered special damages.

General damages are things like losses experienced due to alienation of affection, loss of ability to enjoy hobbies and loss of ability to perform the activities of daily living. The actual cost of such things is difficult to determine; however, most legal teams can assemble a series of numbers that make some reasonable sense. There are also things like punitive damages to consider in some cases. Punitive damages are a way of punishing the offending party for a behavior that was especially egregious.

The legal team needs to respect the statutes of limitations on such cases. The statute of limitations on personal injury cases varies from state to state and represents the amount of time a legal team has to file a claim from the time of the incident. Sometimes the statute of limitations begins from the moment of discovery that negligence has taken place.

LAWYER HELPLINE: ☎ 855 804 7142