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Every school has an Audio Visual Guy (The AV Guy). This was the person responsible for setting up the televisions, videos, slides, speakers, and other sort of audio/visual presentations in schools.

The AV Guy had a tiny office with no windows and poor ventilation. The AV office was once a broom closet, but was converted to accommodate the AV Guy with a small dated desk so that the AV Guy could sit in peace with all of the school’s AV supplies while simultaneously eating his lunch in privacy. The AV Guy’s office would be stacked to the wall with TVs, VCRs, speakers, mics, computers, receivers, and lots and lots of wires and cables! Oh those wires and cables. Some neatly folded. Others a tangled mess, hanging off walls, or anything else standing vertically. There were enough unkept wires and cables to cause a kid get tangled, and slip and fall. Perhaps the hazards of the AV office is why I became a personal injury lawyer, but that’s a another story.

In any event, have you given much thought as to why school’s have dedicated AV Guys? When you look at the position critically, they are not educators, nor are they custodians of the school. So why are education resources spent on AV personnel?

It’s because AV Guys are very important to schools and to educating students.

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Goldfinger Injury Lawyers handles a lot of dog bite, and dog attack cases. Brian Goldfinger’s first case that drew media attention was a dog bite case whereby a woman along with her therapy dog were viciously attacked by three pit bulls in Toronto. The case drew media attention because of the severity of the injuries to the victim, the severity of the injuries to the therapy dog, which eventually died; along with the fact that the dogs which did the attacking were pit bulls, or pit bull mixed breeds.

Liability in dog attack cases is at times, cut and dry.

Did the dog attack someone? Yes or No?

If the answer is yes, then there is a reverse onus which attaches to the dog owner. Regardless of whether or not the dog owner knew of the attack, or knew of the dog’s propensity to attack, or to be aggressive, the dog owner will be on the hook for the actions of his/her dog. At law, we call this concept “strict liability”. If the dog was on a leash, yet still attacked, the Defendant will still be at fault for the actions/aggressive of his/her dog. If the dog was not on a leash, well, then the actions of the dog, and the negligence of the dog owner are plain as day. Certainly, the parties will want to know if the Plaintiff provoked the attack, and this will be a factor in assessing liability, or any form of contribution.

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Last week I was interviewed by a journalist at the Globe & Mail newspaper (remember those?).

She was writing an article on car insurance, and increasing insurance rates in general in Ontario. She wanted to know what a boots on the ground personal injury lawyer was seeing.

I shared with her a few trends which I had observed over the past 12 months:

  1. Premiums were rising for drivers even if they had outstanding driving records with no claims
  2. Part of the reason which premiums appeared to be on the rise was the increase of auto thefts; coupled with the rise in prices for new vehicles, labour and auto parts. I suspect that the looming tariffs and trade war won’t help in that area. Some reports are suggesting that the price of new cars will go up between 15-25%
  3. But don’t fool yourself: insurance companies will find every excuse in the books to increase premiums. They will deliver less coverage, while charging you more money. You are paying more, and getting less in return.
  4. Our personal injury lawyers have noticed an uptick in uninsured claims.

What is an uninsured claim you might ask? Good question!

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Personal Injury Lawyers are familiar with hospitals. Visiting the hospital in order to see an innocent accident victim to conduct a consultation and explain to them their rights is part of the job as a personal injury lawyer. As such, personal injury lawyers get to know the ins and outs and routines at many hospitals. We also see some pretty weird stuff at hospital as well. And these weird occurrences are through no fault of the people hospitalized. It just so happens that hospital can be very strange places. How so you might ask?

For starters, there are no barriers to entry at the hospital. Every Canadian has free healthcare. You don’t have to pay, or pass security in order to get inside of a hospital. As such, you might have people wandering the hallways looking for shelter, a warm bed, pills to steal, supplies like sheets or pillows, or people looking to scam patients who are not at their best. As a personal injury lawyer, I’ve had many clients tell me that while they are staying at hospital, they’ve had strangers approach their bed purporting to be a hospital worker asking for their banking information. I can assure you that hospital staff are not asking patients for their banking information. This doesn’t happen. It can however happen that people with ill intentions enter the hospital trying to defraud or steal patients. While all hospital do have some form of security, it’s never enough to monitor an entire hospital. And, by the time that people have found out that they’ve been stolen from, or defrauded, it’s too late. The focus while staying in hospital is rarely about money or security because hospitals should be (and often are) safe spaces. Rather, it’s about health, recovery, and getting home.

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The policy limits under the majority of standard car insurance policies in Ontario is $1,000,000.

Those policy limits don’t stack. That means that if there are more than 1 vehicle involved in a car accident, it doesn’t mean that the Plaintiff has access to $1,000,000 under one policy, plus $1,000,000 under another policy. It means that the policy limits of the claim are limited to $1,000,000; which, if you think about it long and hard, isn’t all that much money in 2025. Will $1,000,000 buy you a home in Toronto proper? Perhaps it will buy you a home outside of Toronto, but after paying all of the closing costs, insurance, taxes, and furnishing the home, you might not be left with a whole lot. In any event, $1,000,000 today, is not the same as $1,000,000 decades ago.

Insurance companies are reluctant to write lump sum cheques for $1,000,000. There are a lot of policy reasons for that.  Namely, insurers don’t want their willingness to write the cheque, to come back and create a legal problem.

What do I mean by that?

Let’s assume that a car accident case settles for $1,000,000; and the insurer cuts a lump sum cheque. The Plaintiff then takes his/her share of the settlement funds, and blows through them in a matter of months, weeks, or even days. How can one do that? There are plenty of ways, I can assure you.

Months later, the Plaintiff retains a different personal injury lawyer to bring a claim against the insurance company, along with his/her old personal injury lawyer alleging that the settlement was either not enough (improvident); that it was not placed into a structure (improvident); or that the settlement never should have taken place to begin with.

There might be merit to the Plaintiff’s claim. There might be no merit at all. Nonetheless, after the claim has been made, the insurer and the old personal injury lawyer have to defend it; which is a pain in the you know what; particularly after the parties believe that the claim had settled. After all, the Plaintiff did receive a $1,000,000 which s/he agreed to.

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First and foremost, our thoughts are with the 76 passengers and 4 crew members of Delta Air Lines flight 4819 from Minneapolis to Toronto which crash landed on February 17, 2025 at Pearson International Airport in Mississauga.

Thankfully, nobody died.

There were 18 injuries reported in the crash. We can only imagine that there will be more injuries long after the crash given the trauma of what took place. The thought of ever flying in an airplane again must be daunting for the victims, families, friends along with any others impacted by this accident.

We have never heard of an airplane flipping over and coming to a rest upside down; let alone seen footage of that actually taking place! This is another example of how cameras on phones are quite handy in personal injury cases. In the past, we would only hear that the plane landed upside down. We would have to imagine that happening in our heads, which, is quite difficult to picture. But with cameras on phones which capture the event happening itself, there is no longer any need for anyone to imagine that happening. The picture (video) speaks a thousand words and provides very powerful images of what took place. The same idea (of capturing a picture or a video) applies equally to all different sorts of personal injury cases. Those images don’t have to be as dramatic or jaw dropping as a plane crash landing upside down. It can be as simple as the aftermath of a car crash. Or the damage done to vehicles after a car accident. Or as boring as a patch of ice which had not been maintained by a property owner causing a slip and fall accident.

And on that note, this seems like a good segue to introduce the main topic of this week’s installment of the Toronto Injury Lawyer Blog. Slip and Falls accidents.

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You would think that after a car accident, the police arrive quickly on scene to take notes, interview the parties along with any witnesses and prepare an accident report.

When people are injured, the accident needs to be reported to police. But sometimes the injuries at the accident scene are not apparent. They might be tears to tissue which you don’t feel right away. They might be psychological injuries which may not manifest right away. Or, perhaps the accident victim is pumped up with adrenaline (which is very common), and they don’t feel any injury at the scene of the accident; only to return home and the next day feel like terrible pain. So, this notion that the motor vehicle accident needing to be reported to police in the event of injury can be tricky if the injuries are not obvious.

When there is combined damage of $2,000 or more to vehicles or to property, the car accident has to be reported. This is difficult, because the average person is not a certified appraiser. They won’t know the value of the vehicle or property damage because it’s just not something that the average person will know. This is why there are appraisers, because they appraise the value of damage for a living. The expectation that a person know whether or not the damage to the vehicle or to the property exceeds $2,000 is rather far fetched. Nobody is going on the underside of a car at an accident scene with a mechanical light to make sure that the undercarriage of the car is in order. The same can be said when it comes to the alignment of the vehicle. You cannot tell at the accident scene whether or not the vehicle will require a new alignment after an accident. You need a mechanic to check it out. To air on the side of caution, we would recommend that you report the accident rather than not report it.

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Slip and Fall season in Ontario continues. Most of the slip and fall cases we see have to deal with winter conditions, like snow, sleet, slush and ice. They are common occurrences in cold weather climates, especially when temperatures have been consistently below the freezing mark for extended periods of time.

So what do you do after a slip and fall?

This edition of the Toronto Injury Lawyer Blog will attempt to give you a checklist of things to do after a slip and fall. While no such list can be completely exhaustive because each case is different, we’ve attempted to narrow down the most important things to do when after a slip and fall case happens.

As with all personal injury cases, the first and most important thing to do is to get the medical attention and care you need. Your safety and health are top priority, and should not be sacrificed. This means getting medical care following your accident and not refusing treatment which has been offered. Why do we mention this? Too often we see people following accidents think that everything is “ok“, only to find out down the road that things are not “ok“. Insurers take advantage of this by suggesting that your injury was not directly as a result of your slip and fall. Rather, your injury is related to something completely different. They try to create the narrative that had your injury been very serious, legitimate, or directly caused by the slip and fall; that you would have sought out medical attention right away, or not refused treatment. Therefore, your injuries must be related to something else not tied to the subject accident. See how that works!

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Doug Ford’s ruling Conservative Government announced a provincial election to take place on February 27, 2025. Mr. Ford called the election early, because that’s one of the tactical advantages which you have as the ruling party. You get to call the election when it best suits your timeline; and to catch the other parties off guard.

You might not think that Ontario Provincial Elections, or Provincial Politics have anything to do with personal injury cases. But they do! The Ontario Government has ALL of the power with respect to the rules and regulations which get applied to not only personal injury cases, but how the Courts and Tribunals function which have a significant impact on all aspects of a personal injury case.

Let’s take a look at a few examples at how provincial politics, and provincial governments have impacted personal injury cases:

April 1, 2016 The Elimination of the Financial Services Commission of Ontario and the Introduction of the License Appeals Tribunal

The Ontario Provincial Government completely eliminated FSCO, and replaced it with the LAT. In doing so, the completely eliminated all FSCO mediations and arbitrations, along with taking away an innocent accident victim’s right to sue his/her own insurer in Court. They effectively eliminated the rights of all Ontario driver’s and accident victims to sue over an accident benefit claim denial/dispute. They also transferred these cases from knowledgeable arbitrators to inexperienced and “new” adjudicators at the LAT who were not familiar with how car accident cases work. They also eliminated the ability to recover legal costs or disbursements against you own insurer in a proceeding, thereby increasing the power imbalance between an innocent accident victim and a sophisticated, deep pocketed insurance company. They say that in civil litigation, the party with the deepest pockets tends to win. The provincial government certainly aided insurers in making that fight even more imbalanced with the elimination of costs for these car accident cases.

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Winter time slip and fall cases caused by snow, ice or other slippery cold weather conditions are common occurrences in Ontario. But, just because they are common doesn’t mean that we all know what to do after a slip and fall takes place.

It’s common knowledge that when you’re involved in a serious car accident to contact the police. The great thing about police investigations in personal injury cases is that you have a third party making findings at the accident scene itself, and they will record contemporaneous notes. In fact, the police can go one step further and conduct a forensic investigation and event reconstruct the accident as well. But, it’s not so common knowledge to know what to do after a slip and fall accident. The police department does not examine slip and fall cases. There are no police officer’s notes, or reconstruction reports generated by the police after a slip and fall accident.

So, what do you do after a slop and fall accident; particularly in the winter time? Good question! The more you know, the greater chance that evidence will be collected and preserved to better advance and present a personal injury case.

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