Personal injury law—and personal injury lawyers—are frequently misunderstood.
It’s true that this is an area of law that, like criminal defence law, people generally do not want to find themselves involved with: better to not get injured in the first place than to get even the best possible outcome from a personal injury case, and the best possible service from a personal injury lawyer.
What isn’t true is that personal injury lawsuits are just ways for opportunistic lawyers and their clients to make a quick buck, and anyone that has ever been the victim of an accident and experienced long-term suffering as a result knows this is true. Anyone who has tried dealing with insurance companies to get the compensation they are owed knows even more acutely why personal injury lawyers are a necessary part of our civil litigation system here in Calgary.
We are here to make sure people and companies are accountable for their actions, and that those who suffer as a result of other’s negligence get the compensation they deserve for the pain they’ve been caused.
Injury Lawsuits Create Accountability
The law—both criminal and civil law—can be seen as having two interrelated and heavily intertwined purposes: helping to persuade people not to do bad things, and attempting to restore justice when they do bad things anyway. Criminal laws establish punishments for people who do things that cause purposeful harm to others and/or society at large, and these penalties are meant to dissuade people from causing such purposeful harm (“if I steal this I’ll go to jail, so I won’t steal this”) and to provide justice after a theft (“I stole this, so now I have to give up my freedom the way I infringed on someone else’s freedom”).
Civil lawsuits like personal injury suits do the same thing for accidental bad acts and harm caused. The fact that a lawsuit can be brought hopefully prevents accidents by making people think twice about acting more carefully (“if I drive recklessly I might end up owing someone lots of money, so I’ll be more careful”), and they also attempt to restore justice after carelessness has resulted in real harm (“I caused an accident with my reckless driving, so now I need to pay the other guy for the suffering I caused”).
Personal injury lawyers are an important part of ensuring that the system works to prevent accidents brought about by negligence, and to restore justice when these accidents occur and cause injuries. We know how to apply the law to the facts of a case, determining who the negligent party is and making sure they’re accountable for what they did. Without this, there would be no power in the law to dissuade people from acting uncarefully, and no way to ensure that the victims of negligence could get the justice they deserve.
Contacting a Personal Injury Lawyer
Every accident and injury is unique, and requires individual attention from a lawyer with experience handling injury claims. If you or a family member has been injured in an accident and wants to learn more, please contact our office today for a free initial consultation.