Do I Have a Personal Injury Case?

The Four Elements Every Injury Case Must Prove

Every personal injury claim in Canada and the United States stands on the same four legal elements: duty of care (the other party had a legal obligation toward you), breach (they fell below the standard of a reasonable person), causation (their breach actually caused your injury), and damages (you suffered real, provable losses). Miss any one element and there is no case, no matter how badly you were hurt or how careless the other party was. Drivers owe duties to everyone on the road; store owners owe duties to customers under occupiers' liability statutes; doctors owe professional duties to patients — so in most accident scenarios the real battlegrounds are breach and causation.

Breach is proven with evidence: a broken traffic law, a safety code violation, an ignored hazard, witness accounts, or surveillance footage. Causation is proven with medical records that connect the incident to the diagnosis — which is why the single most damaging mistake injured people make is delaying medical treatment. An insurer looking at a three-week gap between accident and first doctor visit will argue the injury came from somewhere else, and that argument works far more often than claimants expect.

Limitation Periods: The Clock That Ends Cases

Most Canadian provinces, including Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia, give injured people 2 years from the date the claim is discovered to start a lawsuit. US states vary widely: Tennessee and Louisiana allow just 1 year, most states allow 2–3 years, and a few (like Maine at 6 years) allow more. These deadlines are strictly enforced — courts dismiss otherwise-strong cases filed a single day late, and the exceptions (minors, incapacity, late discovery of the injury) are narrow.

Shorter deadlines hide inside the general ones. Claims against municipalities frequently require written notice within 10 days to 6 months of the incident — Ontario's Municipal Act requires 10-day written notice for road and sidewalk claims. Claims involving government bodies, transit authorities, and out-of-province defendants each carry their own notice traps. This is why 'how long ago did it happen' is one of the first questions in the assessment above, and why a close deadline turns everything else into a this-week problem.

Why Viable Claims Go Unfiled — and What Contingency Fees Change

Insurance industry data consistently shows that represented claimants recover substantially more than unrepresented ones, even after legal fees — yet many injured people never consult a lawyer because they assume they cannot afford one. Almost all personal injury lawyers in Canada and the US work on contingency: the consultation is free, you pay nothing up front, and the fee (typically 25–40% of the recovery) is paid only if the claim succeeds. If the lawyer declines the case, you have lost nothing and learned exactly where your claim is weak.

The other reason viable claims die is evidence decay. Commercial surveillance systems commonly overwrite footage within 30 days. Witnesses move, memories blur, hazards get repaired, and vehicles get scrapped. A claim that would have been provable in week one becomes a credibility contest by month six. Whatever this assessment tells you about your case's strength, the evidence-preservation steps in your report are worth doing immediately — they cost nothing and they keep every option open.

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