Recently, a post went viral on Tik Tok of a York Regional Police officer checking out his mobile device while driving at what appeared to be a high speed. It would seem unfair that a police officer would be driving around in his police cruiser checking out his cell phone because if members of the general public did the same, they would be given a ticket. But is it? There is a caveat in then Highway Traffic Act which permits police, fire and emergency responders to use the mobile devices while driving. There are likely good policy reasons behind these laws, but I cannot say for certain what pol ..read more

Car insurance, and making a claim after a car accident in Ontario should be simple and straight forward. But, as a personal injury lawyer with two decades of experience in the field, I can tell you that it’s not. Far from it! In fact, car insurance and accident benefit claims are complex and defy common sense. Here are a few items that our lawyers at Goldfinger Injury Lawyers along with our clients have always found rather strange when it comes to car accident claims in Ontario. Item #1 Regardless of fault, the first insurer to respond to the claim is your own car insurance company. Ontar ..read more

The greater your injuries, the greater the value of your personal injury case. The same applies in the opposite. The less severe your injuries, the less value your personal injury case will have. It’s always good to have a healthy and high quality of life and a lower value personal injury case; as opposed to the other way around. Nobody wants a poor quality of life. Money is not a substitute for happiness or for having the inability to manage daily tasks. At some point in your personal injury case, an insurance adjuster, lawyer for the insurance company, or even a Judge might ask a Plaintiff h ..read more

Imagine for a moment that you have a personal injury case with a fast approaching Pre-Trial or Trial date. In the case, liability (how then accident happened and whose fault it is) along with damages are both hotly contested issues. At trial, both lawyers for the Plaintiff and the lawyers for the Defendant expect their respective clients to provide contradictory evidence. It’s a case of s/he said vs. s/he said whereby the Judge and Jury will need to pick a version of events they like the best. What happens is before the trial one of those parties dies? This happens more than you might expect ..read more

The feature article in this Saturday’s Globe & Mail was titled “The End of Winter: What We Lose When We Lose Winter“. To lose the season to climate change seems cataclysmic. I would agree. The article dealt with skiing in Rockies in Western Canada. There are challenges skiing when the weather is too warm and there isn’t enough snow to get in proper ski runs. Last week in Toronto, we hit temperature highs of around 16 degrees. This week, we have seen lows of around -6 degrees. That’s quite the temperature swing. When the weather gets hot, we change our clothes and footwear accordingly. The ..read more

The first long term disability case I had experience with came well before I was a personal injury/disability lawyer. It happened before I was in law school. It happened to my mom. She had just gone through multiple surgeries and had not recovered properly, or at all from them. She had been approved for Long Term Disability just before the surgeries took place. She was around 62 years old. After the surgeries, she remained on disability benefits. But shortly there after the long term disability insurer asked that she attend a few “independent” medical assessments with the insurance company’s d ..read more

The case summary below, involves a car accident in Ontario. It’s not out of the ordinary. This is how many car accident cases across the province play out. The defendant insurer often insists that these cases proceed with a jury, instead of by way of Judge alone. I think the most unfortunate part of this decision is the toll these jury cases take on Ontario’s already over burdened judicial system. It appears that the Judge hearing this case felt the same way too, given that she made a point to comment specifically on the impact which jury trials have on our legal system: “The strategy of offer ..read more

I’ve had a few interesting conversations over the past few days with some very thoughtful, rational, insightful and logical people. These people are not lawyers. They have no skin in the game when it comes to the field of personal injury law. That means that they are neither lawyers, insurance adjusters, service providers, doctors, or lobbyists. It’s always nice to get someone’s perspective on the law, and how they perceive it works (or doesn’t) from an “outsider“. For whatever reason, they were thinking about how the law worked in Ontario. And, in particular, how auto insurance claims worked ..read more

Personal injury cases are never as simple as they might appear to be. The case of an apparently simple slip and fall, just isn’t so simple. On the surface, the case is very easy to summarize. A person is walking on a private walkway. The walkway was not properly maintained for the winter. The person slips, falls, and breaks their ankle. Ouch! On the surface, the Plaintiff would sue the private property owner. That makes total sense. The dynamic of the litigation would be a single Plaintiff against a single insurer acting on behalf of the private property owner. But that’s not what actually hap ..read more

It may be your first time being involved in a serious car accident where you have sustained serious injuries. These are not common events. And because these are not common events, few people know exactly what to after the accident, or how to deal with their car insurer. The purpose of this edition of the Toronto Injury Lawyer Blog is to provide you with quick tips dealing with your Car Insurance Company after a serious collision. 1.You deal with your own car insurer first. Ontario  has a no fault system of accident benefits for car accident cases. That means that regardless of fault, the ..read more