Week Six: The Defence of Personal Injury Claims

The goal of this week’s class is to cover personal injury law from the perspective of the defence, including consideration of the relationship as between defence counsel, the insured defendant, and the insurer (the “Tripartite Relationship”), and the full and partial defences that may be advanced.

Readings:

• Eugene Meehan, Civility as a Strategy in Litigation https://supremeadvocacy.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Civility-as-a-Strategy-in-Litigation.pdf
• Barbara Billingsley, Caught in the Middle: When Liability Insurance Defence Counsel Encounter Coverage Problems https://cbr.cba.org/index.php/cbr/article/view/3792/3785
• Contributory Negligence: Wormald v. Chiarot, 2016 BCCA 415 
• Inevitable accidents and seatbelts: Goronzy v McDonald, 2020 BCSC 869
• Credibility: Lin v Koszmider, 2023 BCSC 752
• Surveillance: Williams v. Sekhon, 2019 BCSC 1511, at paras. 183-223
• Worker-Worker:  Dhaliwal v. City of Richmond, (A1600870 (Re), 2017 CanLII 53435 (BC WCAT)):
• Marchitelli, Rosa, “Injured woman secretly videotaped by insurer, then wrongly accused of fraud,” CBC News, 8/FEB/2021
• Mitigation: MacDonald v. Sadri, 2025 BCSC 2083
• The battle between commercial and public safety interests, see: Kovacs, S.L., “Liability waivers becoming a foe, not friend to the public interest,”  The Lawyers Daily, August 29, 2017. 

• Waivers: Jamieson v. Whistler Mountain Resort Limited Partnership,  2017 BCSC 1001  and Apps v. Grouse Mountain Resorts Ltd., 2020 BCCA 78

• A Tangled Web – Credibility in Personal Injury Cases: Alison L. Murray KC: https://www.murrayjamieson.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/CDL-2011-A-Tangled-Web-%E2%80%93-Credibility-in-Personal-Injury-Cases.pdf