This inaugural episode of Civil Banter introduces hosts Hamish and Stanford, associate lawyers at Nelligan Law, as they dive into the world of civil litigation. The episode covers a range of topics from personal injury and insurance claims to estate litigation, providing both personal and professional insights into the life of a lawyer.
Hosts: Hamish Mills-McEwan and Stanford Cummings
What You'll Learn
Discussion Points
Introduction of Hosts and Their Practices: Hamish and Stanford discuss their roles at Nelligan Law, focusing on injuries, insurance, and civil litigation.
LARPing Segment (Lawyers Are Real People-ing): The hosts share personal anecdotes about their hobbies and interests outside the courtroom, including Hamish’s attempt to build a Lego replica of Kevin McCallister's house from Home Alone and Stanford’s newfound interest in knife sharpening.
One Thing to Rule Them All: This segment delves into a detailed discussion on general damages in civil litigation. The hosts explore the concept of general damages, its implications for clients, and the differences in compensation between the U.S. and Canada. They discuss the historical and current perspectives on cap limits and the reality of how these limits impact claimants.
Reasonable Stan: A playful, educational segment where Stanford tries to assess general damages based on a recent case scenario provided by Hamish, highlighting the challenges and subjective nature of determining appropriate compensation for injuries.
Shout-Outs: The episode concludes with shout-outs to their articling students and a reminder of the importance of participating in provincial elections, emphasizing the impact of political decisions on the civil justice system.
Social Media:
Hamish: I am Hamish, and this is Stan. And this is our inaugural episode of Civil Banter. We are two associate lawyers at Nelligan Law and we practice injuries, insurance, and all things civil litigation. So, Stan, why don't you tell me a bit about your practice?
Stanford: Well, yeah, Hamish, you summed it up a little bit there, but I'll expand. We are both civil litigators. My practice is mostly primarily focused on insurance claims and personal injury actions. I also do a fair bit of estate litigation and occasionally whatever interesting file comes across the desk. So this should be a fun and informative process.
Hamish: And how long have you been at Nelligan's now?
Stanford: Just over a year. How about yourself?
Hamish: I started in 2021, so I'm essentially an old timer at this point.
Stanford: Yeah. So what about your practice? Tell us a bit about that.
Hamish: We have a lot of overlap, as you've noticed when I knock on your door at all hours of the day. But I'm doing personal injury and then I do insurance defense and a bit of solicitor's negligence, which is, that's the scary stuff. That's when lawyers get sued.
Stanford: That's it. Well, I think because we do both sides, we have a nice perspective, balanced outlook on things.
Hamish: Yeah, I think so. I think it either makes both of us better at our respective jobs or possibly makes both of us worse.
Stanford: That's a possibility I hadn't considered until now, but you may be right.
Hamish: Okay. So we're going to start with our first segment, which is called LARPing, Lawyers Are Real People-ing. So in this segment we'll be discussing how we've been filling our time, what have we've been watching, and what have we been up to outside of law.
Stanford: Why don't you kick us off, Hamish?
Hamish: I'll kick us off with an out of season activity. I have a replica of Kevin McCallister's house from Home Alone.
Stanford: Okay. Was this a Christmas gift?
Hamish: This was a wedding gift. It's a Lego replica.
Stanford: I'm intrigued.
Hamish: It was a wedding gift and I hate to say it, but I didn't finish it before the 25th.
Stanford: Okay, so you started it, and I was at your wedding and it was definitely not the winter time.
Hamish: It was definitely not the winter. So I technically had July until December 25th to get it done. Construction started late.
Stanford: Right. So you're like the contractors a lot of our clients see.
Hamish: It's an all too common story, but I settled down in November and the idea was how many weekends can this possibly take to assemble a Lego replica of Kevin McCallister's Home Alone house? As is often the case, things got in the way.
And so at this point it's still visible in our kitchen, which is where we did most of the assembly. But I've actually, I've paused construction and we'll pick it up hopefully around November of next year and we'll get it done. It has everything from Buzz's-
Stanford: Tarantula?
Hamish: Buzz's tarantula.
Stanford: I was going to ask is Buzz's tarantula in there? It is.
Hamish: Buzz's tarantula is in there. We have the scary furnace in the basement and it has the shovel.
Stanford: Okay, yeah.
Hamish: It has the salt bins.
Stanford: What is the neighbor's name? I forget the neighbor's name, but I know what you're talking about. The neighbor with the shovel, right? And he whacks them at the end?
Hamish: That's it.
Stanford: I feel bad we don't remember his name. He was a good guy.
Hamish: So at this point, yeah, we're retiring. We're retiring the Lego and we're going to bring it out again in November of next year. So hopefully this time next year, I'll be showing a completed version of the Lego replica of Kevin McCallister's house.
Stanford: We'll feature it prominently here in between the two of us for our viewers to enjoy.
Hamish: Okay. So, Stan, tell me how have you been filling your time? What have you been watching? What have you been up to outside of work?
Stanford: Well, this is, it's kind of an embarrassing, nerdy activity that I've gotten into. I get occasionally, as I imagine others do, lost on YouTube black holes. And you find yourself watching things you never thought you would. I don't know, the algorithm is scary.
Hamish: Now, this could take a turn for the worst. So what is it that you found on YouTube?
Stanford: Freehand knife sharpening for your kitchen knives. Like a whetstone kind of thing.
Hamish: Okay.
Stanford: Yeah. So I saw that and I thought, yes, my life will be better if my knives are sharp, I should go down this road. I had been given an Amazon gift card for Christmas. I thought, how am I going to put this to use?
Got into the black hole on YouTube. Started watching way, way, way more YouTube videos than I should admit about how to sharpen a knife. And a little over $100 later, I'm the proud owner of a diamond whetstone that I use to sharpen my kitchen knives. So if you come by, maybe I'll do yours.
Hamish: And any injuries as a result so far?
Stanford: Ironically, no. They are safer when sharp, so you're not pushing nearly as hard to cut through whatever you're cutting through.
Hamish: That's true. I found that out when I was cooking at a golf course over a summer.
Stanford: This is something we'll have to explore in future episodes. Chef Hamish. I had heard the rumors and we'll have to hear some of the stories.
Hamish: I'd say cook. I wouldn't elevate it to chef. But a momentary attention lapse, I looked up as the server came, in blade straight through the fingertip of my index finger. I'm not sure if the cameras will pick this up, but if you see my index finger has a little pointiness to it.
Stanford: Oh, God, it's so disfigured.
Hamish: So I've never recovered from the trauma. No, I'm good to go. It was just a flesh wound, but went the tip of my index finger down to the bone. So no whetstoning for me.
Stanford: No. Well, I'll take care of that for you.
Hamish: Okay. So what I want to get into is our second segment. And that segment is One Thing to Rule Them All.
Stanford: It's a classic Lord of the Rings reference right there from two such nerds.
Hamish: And in this segment we're going to take a rule of civil procedure, a legal practice issue, or just a legal thread that we want to pull on. And I think I want to pull on the idea of general damages.
Stanford: I think that's a really nice place to start. It's kind of a softball issue, but one that is important to not only our lives but our clients' lives, and also has a bigger picture importance on policy and politics. Not that we're going to go too far down that rabbit hole, but I agree.
Hamish: Okay, so let's kick it off. Stan, why don't you tell me what are general damages?
Stanford: Yeah. Well, general damages are a form of monetary compensation that are available to accident victims or folks who have been wronged by a defendant. And it's there to compensate people for the pain and suffering that they've gone through, that cannot be financially quantified.
It's not income loss. It's literally for the pain and suffering that somebody's experienced as a result of something that's happened to them, be it a car accident, a slip and fall, or in other much more unpleasant cases, an assault or a sexual assault. So because we can't undo what has happened to somebody, the courts will award them an amount of money as compensation.
Hamish: And so this is the one that when you're hearing about US cases as kind of the stereotype. When you hear about these big $5 million, $7 million, these huge sums, those all come from the situation in the States, where general damage is the same concept, but it's not the same is it?
Stanford: Well, no. They do things very differently down there, whether that's a right or wrong, especially in this climate, it's hard to say. But here in Canada, there's a cap isn't there on how much you can claim. Isn't that right?
Hamish: Yeah. So the cap on general damages, and I'm going to stop calling them general damages, they're general damages for pain and suffering, right? That's the thing to keep in mind.
As a rule, we're talking about personal injury, we're talking about insurance, we're talking about what pain and suffering did you experience as a result of this car accident, slip and fall, the surgery gone wrong? And so our cap is set not by statute, but it's in the case law, right? It's the 1970s, the 1978 trilogy of cases that the Supreme Court decided.
Stanford: Yeah. Back in 1978, the Supreme Court said, "We need some certainty with respect to how much people can expect to receive for these kinds of things." It's going to streamline litigation and like I said, provide for certainty, which always helps settlements and assessing damages. And then back in 1978, the maximum award was $100,000.
Hamish: Right. And then as we're sitting here today, 2025, $100,000 isn't quite the same. And so while there hasn't been a case that necessarily set exactly what the threshold is per year, what we do is we look back at $100,000 and then we adjust it for inflation. So what's the figure for the maximum pain and suffering award today?
Stanford: Yeah. So I was just on the Bank of Canada's website, they have an inflation calculator. And the 2025 value adjusted for inflation for $100,000 is $459,544 in 2025 dollars.
Hamish: Right. So obviously big change, but the question I'm thinking about today is, is that cap enough? Does that cap line up with our expectations in terms of a maximum award for pain and suffering? And I also want to talk about how judges and juries, how they come up with these numbers and what type of analysis they're doing? And does the case law really reflect what we think general damages should look like today?
Stanford: I wonder how many minutes we've set aside for this chat. Yeah, no, it's a great question that we've both been in front of judges at pretrials and in front of mediators when this issue arises about quantifying the general damages. And you hear about, "Well, it'll be a jury of six people who will make this decision." So they're not as generous.
We hear as judges, which I don't necessarily agree with, I think that there's been a real shift lately in how much a juror is going to award versus a judge. But with that maximum amount in mind, Hamish, what do you think about this cap and how it factors into what's fair? The judges always tell us, "We can't undo what happened to you and this is an amount of money that is being offered." But is it fair?
Hamish: Right. And I mean where I think they've got it right generally speaking is with orthopedic injuries, I think it's easier to look through the cases. And at least regardless of whether it's right or wrong, the actual number, we can compare one case to another. And we can look at whether or not this figure is in line with the other cases.
And I think when it comes to fractures, broken bones, it's a lot easier to be able to tell a client your expectation of what their claim for pain and suffering is going to be worth. And in principle, it shouldn't be like that because while a fractured bone is evidence that someone did in fact suffer the injury they say they did.
Stanford: Yeah, it's pretty objective.
Hamish: It's an objective injury, which from our perspective as lawyers, makes the job of quantifying the claim and concluding whether or not someone will have a claim and what the value is. It makes our job easier when there's an orthopedic objective injury. But in principle, the subjective experience of pain as a result of an accident doesn't depend on whether or not the injury is objective.
Stanford: Yeah. You raise a great point. Obviously somebody who breaks an ankle and they're an Olympic class athlete, their loss is a lot more significant than if I break my ankle. Or if there's someone less athletic than I am if they break their ankle. It's a different experience for everybody. And do you think the courts adequately consider that?
Hamish: I think they do a good job at holistically taking into account everything that's happening in someone's life and coming to that assessment. But I just find they have an easier case when it is a broken bone. But when it's a psychological injury, when it's a concussion, that's where I think there's a lot more variation.
And that's why it's harder at the outset to say, "I can reasonably believe and I can reasonably expect that this type of injury might result in this level of damages." And I think where the case gets really difficult is where you have the under-compensation being on transitory injuries.
So my wife has had an injury and she's been suffering for a couple of months. So she's going to recover, but it's just a couple of month period in which she's suffering pain and suffering. So I think the justice system has an easy time when someone's got an injury that has lasted many years and is expected to last many years into the future.
But just being close to it, when someone has even a three-month period of pain and suffering, I think most of the time if a court, if a judge or a jury looked at a three-month period in which you had a pain and injury, I think they would be talking about $1,000, $2,000. I think it's getting into really kind of nominal figures that I don't think capture what someone's experience is. Going for three months, three months of serious pain and injury, while you're in it, that can feel like an eternity.
Stanford: Yeah, I can imagine it would. And I guess maybe they don't do a good enough job focusing on the impairment and they do more of a focus on the injury itself. And I think that's maybe getting a little too nuanced for episode one.
But injury versus impairment. You can be diagnosed with a particular injury, but what does it stop you from doing? And maybe the analysis really should be on that. And how it impacts somebody's life versus, well, what happened to you?
Hamish: Right. And you told me about the inflation calculator, and I think you did a couple of comparisons in terms of just going back to the cap. We know there's this effective cap of essentially 460 grand, 460,000.
Stanford: Right. And that's for your worst possible, worst conceivable, non-fatal injury, which I mean can be terrible, obviously.
Hamish: Yeah. And it's the worst you can imagine. The reference point I often use is I just say quadriplegic, unable to walk again. And that's not even to say that is the cap, but just to impress upon a client, this is effectively where the cap is for the most serious of injuries and all the assumptions you can make on what impact that had on someone's life.
So if that's the cap, has that cap kept up? Well, has it kept up with the use of money as it was in 1978 versus as that use of money is today?
Stanford: Yeah, well, without becoming an economic podcast, I can tell you in a quick bit of Googling, as we, all great lawyers will Google, the average house in 1978 apparently was about $62,000.
Hamish: Must be nice.
Stanford: Yeah, no kidding. And with a maximum monetary award of $100,000, you could buy more than a house with that. Today with a maximum award of just under $460,000, we find an average home price. And I googled this yesterday in Ontario at least, of $858,600. So you're buying half a house as opposed to more than a house.
Hamish: And when you told me those numbers earlier, what I first went to you was, "Well, is that just a statement about house prices?"
Stanford: Sort of.
Hamish: Yeah. And the answer is sort of, but also-
Stanford: I still think it's important because I think if you're going to be compensating somebody for some of the worst conceivable injuries that are out there, what is something that's going to be important to them? Security and stability and housing. And if you can provide that with a general damages award, it's going to go a long way to sort somebody feeling like they've come even close to being compensated for what's happened to them.
Hamish: Right.
Stanford: So In 1978, if you've been rendered a quadriplegic, but you can buy yourself a beautiful, now that's putting aside obviously care costs and things like that, I think it will resonate with people in a way that this doesn't today.
Hamish: Yeah.
Stanford: And maybe that's why I think we're seeing juries lean towards more compensation for people, as opposed to the judges. Because if you appear in front of six people who have their own mortgages and carry their own costs and have seen all this inflation lately, they're going to be more likely I think to say, "Yeah, let's up this award. This person's been through brutal experience." And they can't even buy a car with some of these settlements that are being given out.
Hamish: And this is not the correct legal analysis. This is not how to think about it. But at the back of my mind somewhere-
Stanford: I know where you're going with this. Yeah.
Hamish: When I think about general damages on some level, the question I'm asking myself is, how much would you have to pay me to inflict that injury upon me? And so if it's a fractured knee, there is a number, and the number's different for everyone, right?
Stanford: That'd be a high number.
Hamish: But it does capture that the number for general damages is based on the individual plaintiff. So if someone said, "Yes, I would let you fracture my rib if you paid me $25,000," it at least starts you thinking about is the general damages' compensation, is it really compensating? Is it really adequate for the injury suffered?
Stanford: Yeah. And well, our question off the top was is it fair? And I think you said, and I agree with you on orthopedic injuries, it's close, I think to fair. When you use your analysis of could you pay me X dollars to break my wrist? Possibly.
Hamish: What's your number, Stan?
Stanford: On a broken wrist? I don't know. It'd be close. It'd be like 40 or 50,000.
Hamish: Dominant or non-dominant hand?
Stanford: Non-dominant.
Hamish: I think that's a bargain.
Stanford: I broke a finger playing softball while I was still lawyering, and then I had to switch to dictation software for a little while. Because it was on my right hand and it wasn't that bad. I mean, that's just a finger, not a wrist, but it would be worse for sure. You don't realize how hard it is to type away and things and how much time we spend doing that.
Hamish: And again, though, even your assessment that it wasn't that bad, again, that's your assessment from you experiencing that. But that doesn't account for someone who all the meaning in their life is based around-
Stanford: Hand model.
Hamish: Yeah, hand model.
Stanford: Hand model.
Hamish: Hand model would be, yeah, that would be a good example. But someone who's very artistic or someone that their activity is golf and they're not able. That's all they do. They're retired, they're elderly. Golf is their activity. That's all the exercise they get. It's all they want to do.
They're retired so that they can, all they want to do is play golf. And now they can't swing a golf club. The impact it has on that person is very different than the person who-
Stanford: Hey, I had to miss the remainder of that softball season.
Hamish: I think it was the, is this pre-Nelligan's?
Stanford: Yeah.
Hamish: Okay. Did you disclose that injury before you joined the Nelligan softball team?
Stanford: They need me. They need that bat.
Hamish: Okay. The other thing that I wanted to talk about in the context of general damages is juries versus judges. And what the thoughts are, what the industry wisdom is around who gives better general damage awards?
Stanford: Yeah. Well, we always hear, well, every case, the defendant, the insurance company always puts the jury notice in. That's like a rite of passage, basically. They do it almost every time, except I would say in fatalities.
Hamish: And let's slow down a bit. What is the jury notice? What does that mean?
Stanford: So in the Province of Ontario, any party may elect in a superior court action that is not a simplified procedure or a small claims procedure, to elect to have the case heard by a jury. And that's six random individuals pulled off the street, off the jury list.
Hamish: Figuratively.
Stanford: Yeah.
Hamish: But almost literally.
Stanford: Almost literally. Yeah. And they are the decision makers, the triers of fact. And they sit in place of, a judge will still be at the trial, but the judge will not make the decision about an award or about liability. It will be left to the jury.
And so for a very, very long time, and still today, the defendants, as you have put in on, I'm sure when you're retained by an insurer, it put in a jury notice, as I always do. I think, I don't know, I love jury trials. I haven't done one in a while. I wish I could do more of them and maybe there's some on the horizon soon.
But I think there's something wonderful about the democratic process, about you being inserted into the legal system as just a regular person, getting to see our institutions at work. And I'll take the, no offense to our judiciary, but I'll take the opinion about six regular people over somebody who's in this system every day of their life.
I think that a jury brings a great perspective. Maybe all the other plaintiff lawyers in the city won't agree with me on this. But I do think there is a swing going in the right direction about juries being perhaps more generous than judges on compensation.
Hamish: Well, and I think the understanding is too, it does reflect your community and it reflects why you practice. So I've kind of had the impression that people expect that juries in Ottawa are a bit more plaintiff friendly than some of the juries in Toronto.
And when you think about it, the demographics and what people do for a living in that area, the cost of living in that area, what type of professions people work in, they surely all make an impact on kind of this assessment that doesn't have a formula. There's no formula. There's not going to be an expert at trial saying, "This is the range of general damages you're picking between."
It really does come from, guided by the facts and how the case is presented, it comes down to those jury members. And in different regions, on average, it's possible that people have different approaches. Which might mean perhaps in Toronto, insurance defense counsel can use the threat of a jury to scare a plaintiff and say, "Listen, go to a Tim Horton's, pick six random people. That's who's going to be trying your case."
Stanford: You're doing my former opening at mediation or pre-trial as a-
Hamish: Stan, I hate to break it to you, but it's not an original opening.
Stanford: No, I know. It's a standard sort of thing that everybody hears, especially as you said, from lawyers whose area code starts with 416. But I don't know if that necessarily rings as true as some people think it does.
Hamish: Yeah.
Stanford: Certainly, I think the recent decisions coming out of Ottawa would indicate that our juries are giving substantial compensation to folks.
Hamish: Okay, well, we're on a roll. I think we're just going to move straight in to our next segment, which is the Reasonable Stan. And in this segment I will be going on CanLII, the legal research database, in my opinion better than Westlaw. I clicked on Ontario, I clicked on ONSC, the Ontario Superior Court.
I searched general damages in quotations within five words of award. And I filtered that by decision date newest. And I take the most compelling case that I found on that page, and I'm going to be asking Stan to assess general damages and we'll see how close he can get to the real numbers.
So before we get into this, we do have a scoring system. And the scoring system as follows. So I'm going to read you some facts from the case and you're going to assess general damages. And your goal is to get as close as possible to the actual number.
Now, the delta between your assessment figure and the actual figure, that's going to be your score. And the goal is to get the lowest score possible because your score is going to represent a debt owed by you to me.
Stanford: Okay.
Hamish: Okay? So this could be, if the real figure is 300,000 and you're guessing 100,000, you'll be owing me $200,000.
Stanford: All righty.
Hamish: And the end of, I'm going to say by the end of the 12th Reasonable Stan segment, all debts are going to be forgiven.
Stanford: Oh, that's nice.
Hamish: We're going to alternate. So I'll be owing you some money too, and maybe it nets out.
Stanford: Sounds good. Let's go.
Hamish: Okay, so the case we're looking at today is Bainbridge and 1392396 Ontario Limited. It's a 2024 decision. Now, it's a slip and fall. One plaintiff, she fell down the stairs of her rental unit, slipping on snow and ice. The defendants were her landlords. It took place in 2016, and this is a 2024 decision.
She was holding onto her young son at the time. She fell on her knee and cracked her knee into the bottom cement step. Okay?
Stanford: All right.
Hamish: She was wearing winter boots, fortunately. She'd gone up and down the stairs many times before with her child in a similar way. An x-ray showed a lateral tibial plateau fracture. Now I am just going to cut the chase. It doesn't say her age, but it's sort of, you can draw a conclusion.
Stanford: Young child. Okay.
Hamish: Yeah, she has children. It's unclear how many.
Stanford: Plural? Okay.
Hamish: Plural, but we're not sure exactly how many. And her youngest child is nine.
Stanford: Okay. Anything about her lifestyle?
Hamish: I mean, she's a mother.
Stanford: Okay. Doesn't mention a marathon runner in there.
Hamish: No mention of marathon running, no mention of her vocation.
Stanford: Okay, interesting.
Hamish: So this is a bit bare bones, but this really comes down to, I think, and well, it's you who's going to be guessing, but it comes down to just, it's the orthopedic injury, as I said. Which I think they have an easier time assessing sometimes.
Stanford: Does it say anything about how long she spent in a cast?
Hamish: I can tell you that she was in hospital for seven days.
Stanford: Okay. Open reduction, internal fixation surgery?
Hamish: And to translate that, yes, she was screwed back together. So yeah, there was surgery. She had hardware installed, a metal plate and screws in her leg. There was a cast. I don't have the timeline on how long she was in a cast, but she was in a cast.
Stanford: Okay. And is there any information about ongoing limp or post recovery? Acute recovery period, kind of physical impairment?
Hamish: Yeah, so by the time of this decision, she's definitely been struggling. Stairs is the big issue. She really struggles with stairs.
Stanford: This is eight years post-accident?
Hamish: This is eight years post-accident. She's struggling with stairs. Her knee throbbed, and she had difficulty walking or standing for any extended periods of time. She still uses a cane at times.
Stanford: Okay.
Hamish: Okay. What else do you need to know?
Stanford: I think that's enough. I like the less I know, the wider my landing spot sounds in my head.
Hamish: Okay.
Stanford: All right. I was originally going to be in the 175 range, but I think I'm going to move that up based on the fact that eight years have gone by and she's still using a cane. So I'm going to say just under two, maybe 195.
Hamish: Generous. Generous, Stan.
Stanford: It is generous. Yeah.
Hamish: Very generous, Stan, because the actual number is $150,000
Stanford: 150. So my original 160 would've been good, but I bumped it up quite a bit.
Hamish: Do you know what? And that just goes to show your original instinct is still tarnished by your career as an insurance defense lawyer.
Stanford: Or my gut is always right.
Hamish: So yeah, this case was an undefended case.
Stanford: Undefended?
Hamish: It's a-
Stanford: Well, we could have got her two on, with the default judgment.
Hamish: So it was undefended. And there's really not a lot of information about her life in that. It really does focus on a couple of comments about her being a mother. The difficulties she has looking after her children. Nothing on her vocation.
There were experts involved. And an MRI finding showed what I think is some really serious issues given the length of time. And she had a second surgery. She had a-
Stanford: A second surgery?
Hamish: To remove the hardware because they thought it-
Stanford: No infection or anything though, right?
Hamish: No infection. But this happens, I say somewhat regularly, where in at least our experience, I think when hardware is installed. But then when there's this chronic contractable pain, it gets the point where-
Stanford: It fails, it has to be replaced.
Hamish: It fails, or they think it's going to give some symptom release. They do the second surgery. But in this case, at least, there was some improvement. But at the end of the day, she was still using a cane, at least at times.
Stanford: So circling back to your thought, if I broke your leg, would you take $150,000 to walk with a limp for the rest of your life?
Hamish: No. And I mean, especially I don't have children. If I was having to run after children, look after children.
Stanford: It's a permanent injury.
Hamish: Absolutely not. And also, that money, it's to compensate you for the rest of your life. So when you're 82 years old.
Stanford: And you've got arthritic parts, yeah.
Hamish: Yeah. I mean, how could that possibly compensate you there?
Stanford: What if you get confined to a wheelchair sooner? What if you get a stair lift sooner?
Hamish: And that's a whole different topic in terms of there is the more quantifiable side of damages, which we'll get into in a later podcast. But that's when we get into what will be the cost of medical care in the future? What will be the cost of your income changing in the future? But for general damages alone, and this is essentially a general damages only case, I think that's low.
Stanford: You can't even put a down payment on an $858,000 house with that.
Hamish: Exactly. But at the end of the day, I will also say that what we're looking at are we're looking at decisions. And it's imperfect. We're not seeing the person in front of us. We don't have the benefit of reading all the expert reports.
Stanford: And if it's looked at in the context of 460 as your worst-case scenario, maybe it is a fair number, right?
Hamish: Right.
Stanford: Yeah. And is the answer, that number needs to increase?
Hamish: And maybe that's a question we'll address in a future episode, but now it's time for shout-outs. And in shout-outs, we shout out a person, a thing, a news tidbit, or an event. And I think we're unanimous on who we're shouting out.
Stanford: We are, yes. First episode, unanimous shout-out. We're shouting out our excellent articling students right now who are doing firm tours of the students who are interviewing for summer positions. They've been taking them around and getting them to meet with the folks here at Nelligan. They've done a really great job and they've taken a lot of time to do it out of their schedules. So they've been great.
Hamish: Yeah. And shouting them out because they're basically selling, they're basically walking this line. They're selling future students on the firm. I'd say that's an easy job. But they're selling future students on the firm.
But they're also, we want them to really be like, "You can ask us anything and we're not going to rat you out to management. And explain all the questions you wanted to know." So it's a hard line to walk, I think. So Joe, Joyce, and Kyle have been doing an excellent job with that.
And then the second shout-out I'd like to give is to elections. Depending on when this airs, there's a provincial election in Ontario. You might have already voted. We might know the result of that. And all we want to stress is that provincial elections matter. And they matter when it comes to the civil justice system.
Because at the end of the day, everything we're talking about today, everything we're talking about, the rules that govern civil litigation, how the benefit system works when you're injured in a car accident, these are all provincial jurisdiction matters. And even if the election doesn't go in the way that you are hoping, you still have an MPP. And you should write to your MPP and let them know if you have concerns about this stuff.
Stanford: Yeah, that's right. Justice and laws and everything that we do here starts at either Queens Park or Parliament Hill. And some things can change with judicial decisions. Obviously we have a common law legal system.
But I am fully on board with that, Hamish. And people have to be engaged in the process if they want meaningful changes to certain aspects of their life.
Hamish: And with that, we'll say our goodbyes. You can find our team at NelliganLaw.ca. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm an occasional poster, trying to get a bit better on that content schedule. Hamish Mills-McEwan, and you can reach me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn.com/IN/HMillsMcEwan. Stan, how would you like to be?
Stanford: I'm also on LinkedIn. I don't look at it. I don't go there. Maybe I should. I will get better, as telling me to get better. So I will get better at that. You can find me there. But just send me an email if you want to connect Stanford.Cummings at NelliganLaw.ca. And we will try and get an email address going for this podcast.
Hamish: Yeah, we're looking for comments, suggestions, feedback, special guest suggestions. Civil Banter at NelliganLaw.ca is going to be the email address. And that's a wrap. Thanks for joining us on our first episode of Civil Banter.
Stanford: Thanks everyone.