Legal matters with chris richard negligence claims

Legal Matters with Chris Richard Negligence Claims Lee Sterry: Legal matter time with Chris Richard. He’s in studio with us today, from Graves and Richard, Niagara’s largest personal injury law firm. And we are going to delve into an area today that is greatly misunderstood in a lot of cases, Chris, and that’s negligence claims.

Chris Richard: That’s right, good afternoon.

Lee Sterry: Good afternoon again.

Chris Richard: It’s good to be here again. Yeah, negligence claims. They tend to get a bad reputation and I think they often get a bad reputation in the community or, sorry, in the media and then that flows down to the community.

Lee Sterry: It’s always the media’s fault, it’s always our fault, we have broad shoulders, and we can take it, now that that’s been said.

Chris Richard: As long as we agree on that point. But what I wanted to do was to explain a little bit about the purpose behind negligence claims and then talk a little bit about some of the misconceptions that we see. So first off, what do we mean by a negligence claim? So, it’s actually quite broad and can involve a lot of things. Some examples that we typically think about would be icy side walks, driveways, trip hazards, defective products, actions of somebody; so if you’re walking and you accidentally trip into somebody and cause them to fall. And we have to remember, sometimes this all sounds very theoretical but someone’s life could change in a split second, and one day you’re walking down the street and everything is normal and then the next minute because of a fall that happens in a blink of an eye, life has changed forever. A simple fall or an accident can result in broken bones or multiple surgeries.

Lee Sterry: Because we laugh at these all the time.

Chris Richard: But keep in mind that this case was heard in a court room, it was presented to a jury of at least six people, and in the U.S. sometimes it’s even more. And those six people heard all the facts, not just a snip, and they decided that the defendant did something wrong and that the plaintiff needed to be compensated. And juries don’t compensate people for frivolous things, juries are pretty smart and if something is frivolous they don’t have a lot of time for it. But I find with these cases they are kind of closing minds a little bit. So that even when we have a jury here in Ontario, you know they are thinking about the Lee Sterry: Thank you very much Chris. Chris Richard from Graves and Richard. This has been Legal Matters and we will come back and do it all again next Thursday at one o’clock, we always learn something.