Article edited by Walter W. Kubitz, KC, a personal injury lawyer in Calgary, Alberta.

How Will Multiple Motor Vehicle Accidents Affect My Damage Award

If you have been involved in a motor vehicle accident, you know how difficult it can be to recover from your injuries. If you are in a second motor vehicle accident while still healing from the first one, those difficulties are compounded. Multiple accidents can also compound the challenges of advancing your claim for compensation, since and it may be difficult to determine which injuries result from which accident. How do the courts assign damages in that kind of situation?

In any motor vehicle accident claim, in order for a plaintiff to be awarded damages, they must prove causation. Essentially, you must prove that the defendant’s wrongful conduct was the actual cause of your injuries and losses. In most cases, courts analyze causation by applying a “but for” test: but for the negligence of the defendant, would you have suffered damage? If you have suffered injuries as a result of multiple accidents, in theory each defendant should be responsible only for the portion of your damages that result from his/her negligence.

Where two accidents have caused you to suffer separate injuries – for example, in the first accident, you suffered a head injury and in the second, your leg was broken – it is relatively straight-forward to identify the damages that should be attributed to each defendant. The exercise is more complicated, however, if you have been involved in multiple accidents that caused the same injury – for example, you were rear-ended in two separate accidents, both causing whiplash injuries that have not fully healed.

Even in that case, courts will still try to determine each defendant’s separate liability. The objective is that the first defendant’s liability should be limited to damages that would have been assessed if the second accident never happened, and the second defendant should only be liable for any aggravation of your original injury that flowed from the second accident.

Evidence from medical professionals is crucial to establishing both the extent of your injuries and the degree to which they result from an accident. When more than one accident is involved, the medical experts will be asked to give an opinion about what injuries you sustained in the first collision and how much you had recovered from those injuries before being injured again. Where both accidents caused similar or overlapping injuries, the experts will attempt to determine to what extent your original injuries were aggravated or made worse by the subsequent accident(s).

However, this can be a difficult determination even for the medical experts, and it is not uncommon for experts in the same case to arrive at different opinions about how much of a plaintiff’s injuries to attribute to each accident. The court then has to weigh these different points of view alongside other evidence that is available, and come to a best approximation of how much responsibility for your injuries should be attributed to each of the defendants. This conclusion is usually expressed as a percentage of your overall damages (eg, 75 % to the defendant in the first accident, 25% to the defendant in the second accident).

Assessing causation and damages is always a fact-specific exercise and every case involves unique considerations. This can be particularly true if you have been involved in multiple accidents. The assistance of an experienced personal injury lawyer may be very important in ensuring that your claim is properly handled.

For more than 30 years, Kubitz Law has worked to protect the interests of Alberta injury victims. Contact us for a free consultation to discuss your injury claim.