Aside from car accidents, slip and falls are probably the most common types of injury-producing accidents that we see. One of the things that poses an issue for some clients we see are the notice of limitation periods. Basically those are rules that say that you have to notify the defendant within a prescribed period of time if you plan go after them for compensation.
There are some pretty severe limitation of notice periods out there depending on where you fall, and so it’s really important that people speak with an injury lawyer pretty quickly after an accident to learn all of the rules. The other thing that we spend a lot of time educating our clients about is the law itself with respect to slip and falls.
A lot of people think if they fall and injure themselves on someone’s property that person is required to provide them with some compensation just because it happened. And that’s not the law in Ontario. The law in Ontario requires us to show why the defendant failed to meet what’s called a standard care.
Basically that they didn’t take reasonable steps to keep the property safe. In most cases, that’s the test and it requires a pretty detailed analysis of what was done and what could have been done to keep the property safe. So that’s something that we have to look into in considerable detail in these cases.