If you are asking this question you obviously have a serious issue that should be addressed by an Ontario Personal Injury Lawyer. We are personal injury lawyers in Hamilton, Burlington, Oakville, Milton and Toronto. We can help with this exact sort of situation.
Firstly, you will be provided accident benefit replacement income from your own insurance company. You will be paid up to a maximum of $400.00 weekly. Conversely, when you sue an at-fault driver in a car accident you have the right to claim loss of past and future income over and above your accident benefit income replacement. This means there will be a loss of income from the date of your accident to the trial date and a loss of income from the trial date to your age of retirement. If you are now a paraplegic and can no longer function vocationally, then you will be afforded a loss of income based on assumptions put together by a proper economist in correlation with what you are trained for and what you made before the accident.
Because of the difficulty in forecasting economic loss, courts have over time made it less onerousfor a plaintiff to prove his or her loss of income. Normally when you sue someone, you must prove your claim on a balance of probabilities, or by 51%. A lawsuit is not like criminal law where you would need to establish beyond a reasonable doubt. However, the burden is even less onerous to prove income loss. What you must do is prove that there is a substantial and realistic possibility that you will lose income in the future. This possibility however, must not be speculative and must be supported by expert opinions. Haber & Associates would retain proper economists and accountants to provide expert and cogent evidence that there is a substantial possibility that you will lose income in the future. What we must essentially do is prove that there is a reasonable chance of such loss occurring in the future in order to protect you and your family from permanent interruption of cash flow.
In addition, you don’t have to prove that income loss is an all or nothing proposition. There is also the argument of loss of opportunity, loss of chance and loss of competitive advantage. You can be awarded loss of income for all of the above that would include contingencies in what you are able to make. If you have been rendered paraplegic and you still have the ambition and will to work, you may be able to re-train and handle a more sedentary location. Deductions for loss of income would be scaled down to include the contingencies of what you are able to make. Proving economic loss is very complicated. Proving loss of earning capacity and loss of competitive advantage is even more complicated.
If you have been rendered less capable overall from earning income from your employment because somebody caused you an injury, or you have become less marketable or less attractive to potential employers, or if you have lost the ability to take advantage of job opportunities which might otherwise have been open to you had you not been injured, or if you view yourself as less valuable as a person capable of earning income in a competitive labour market, please contact Haber & Associates. We will be able to assist you in recovering the right compensation for your compromised losses.
If you have any questions, please contact a Personal Injury Lawyer at our Haber & Associates Burlington office at (905)-639-8894.