Personal Injury Lawyers: directory of firms

Limitation periods are the hard edge of this area of law. In British Columbia, the Limitation Act sets a basic limitation period barring a court proceeding more than two years after the day the claim is discovered, and an ultimate limitation period of fifteen years from the underlying act or omission. Other provinces set their own basic periods, their own discovery rules and their own special notice requirements, particularly for claims involving municipalities or the province itself.

Compensation systems carry separate clocks. WorkSafeBC tells injured workers that they have up to one year from the date of injury to report it, while encouraging them to report immediately, because the sooner the board hears about a claim the sooner it can decide it. Insurance policies add their own notice deadlines on top. The safe assumption is that at least one deadline is already running, so get advice early rather than after treatment finishes.

Injury work is commonly done on a contingency basis, where the lawyer's fee depends on recovering something, rather than billed hourly as the file goes along. Contingency agreements are governed by provincial rules and must be in writing, so read yours and ask the firm to walk you through it in plain language before signing.

The questions that matter are the same everywhere: how the fee is calculated, whether it is calculated before or after disbursements are taken out, who pays disbursements such as medical reports and expert opinions if the claim does not succeed, whether any costs could be awarded against you, and what happens if you change lawyers partway through. Ask them at the first meeting and get the answers in the agreement, not in an email.

These are separate systems with separate rules, and they interact. A workplace injury normally starts with a claim to the provincial board, and WorkSafeBC, for instance, allows up to one year from the date of injury to report one. Whether the same injury can also support a court claim depends on your province's workers' compensation legislation and on who caused the injury, which is a question to put to a lawyer before you file anything.

Collisions work differently again. Benefits available after a crash, and whether any court claim can be brought at all, depend on the auto insurance scheme in the province where the collision happened, and those schemes are not comparable across the country. Disability benefits add a third layer, since they come from a policy or a plan and are argued on the wording of that contract. Before you sign a release, give a recorded statement or accept a first offer, find out which of these tracks you are on and what signing would close off.