A: You may compare your claim to those of injured people whose cases have been decided by a judge by reading several judges’ written reasons explaining their awards. One of the major factors judges consider in making their awards for pain and suffering is how long the injured person has or will in the future suffer significant pain and disability. If you have suffered a serious injury, you will not know your long-term outcome for months or even years, so it is difficult to make a comparison.

If you decide to hire us to handle your claim, we will—at your request—provide you with ten or fifteen one-page summaries of recent decisions of Supreme Court judges in cases involving injuries similar to yours. We will then meet with you to discuss the case summaries and discuss which ones are more or less severe than the likely consequences of your injuries.

Judges’ full decisions are posted on the internet on the judgement database of the “Courts of British Columbia”. It goes back to 1996. We will print out for you the full decisions that are most similar to your own situation. Alternatively, we will provide you with the URL’s of each of the judges’ reasons so that you can read them on the internet.

Most people find it easier to read the full decisions—which can be very long—after they have first read the one-page summaries. There are no summaries on the Court of British Columbia’s judgement database. These summaries are created by private services and sold by subscription to lawyers, ICBC and Courthouse libraries.

To get a flavour as to the range of what judges award for pain and suffering for particular injuries of various levels of severity, read a number of the “reasons for judgement” of judges on database of the “Courts of British Columbia” at:

http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/

Click on "Search Judgments" on the top right of this page to reach the "Search the Reasons for Judgments Database" page.

Under "SEARCH CRITERIA" on this page do the following to the right of each of these words:

“Query” - enter the type of injury you have suffered, e.g., herniated disc, broken femur or just femur, shoulder, brain injury or brain, post traumatic stress, mild whiplash, moderate whiplash or severe whiplash, chronic pain, fibromyalgia.

“Court(s)” - select Court of Appeal and Supreme Court. The Court of Appeal cases are particularly useful regarding jury awards for pain and suffering. Jury awards themselves are not published since juries do not give any reasons for their awards, but many jury awards are appealed by ICBC (if the jury award was high) or by the injured person (if the jury award was low.)

“Year” - select the present year first. After reviewing the cases for this year, select the previous year and slowly work backwards in time.

“Records per page”- select 50 records per page since it is easier to browse this way.

“Sort order”- select “Relevancy.”

Then click on “Search.”

Your search results will then appear. The case names will be numbered. Look at the name of the first case listed. Below the case name are the words:

“Show Highlights (condensed)”- Click on this. It will allow you to quickly determine if the claimant had similar injuries to yours. In these snippets, you may see the number of the paragraph in the full reasons for judgement that deals with the issues you are interested in, i.e., the amount of the award for pain and suffering, how serious the injury was and how long it lasted. Look for the words “non-pecuniary damages”. This is a technical legal word for pain and suffering or non-financial (pecuniary) damages.

To read or scan the full reasons for judgement – Write down any relevant paragraph numbers from the condensed version. Then scroll to the top of the condensed version page and click on the document name (a series of numbers and letters). This will take you to the full reasons for judgement of the judge.

To scan the next case - If you are not interested in the case, or after you have read the case, use your web browser to go back to your “search results” page. Then click in the section for the next case “Show Highlights (condensed)”.

Once you have finished looking at some cases, be sure to return to our web site. (You may want to bookmark it now). We have more answers to your questions. Better yet, email or phone us with your questions, concerns or feedback.