An Analysis of Bodily Injury Liability Judgements in Ontario
Introduction
A list of about 1,850 bodily injury court awards in Ontario was compiled by the County of Carleton Law Association.[1] The list frequently contained more than one injury classification award arising out of the same case. Accordingly, there are really only about 975 case awards.
This op-ed summarizes the results.
Subgroup Results
We first examined “large” awards: a subgroup of cases whose judgements were more than $500,000.
In the last twenty years, there were 109 bodily injury or death judgements in Ontario courts which exceeded $500,000., i.e. about 11% of the 975 awards.
The table and figure below summarize the results by type of injury.
Figure 1: Canadian Bodily Injury Judgment
The mean judgement in the >$500k subgroup was about $2,150,000. That amount comprised an average of $210,000 in general damages, and $1,940,000 in other damages (loss of income, aggravated damages, care and support costs, expenses, etc.).
The distribution of these large judgements by size is shown below.
Figure 2: No. of Judgments by Size
Judgements By Year
The combined value of all judgements (>$500,000) by year is shown below.
Figure 3: Total Judgements (>$500,000), by Year
The primary cause of the year-to-year variance was very large total judgements in four out of the twenty years[2].
Entire Group Aggregate Results
Group results (all judgements) are as follows:
Takeaways
The following observations are offered.
Roughly 11% one in nine Ontario bodily injury and death awards were more than $500,000.
These 11% of large cases represent 61% of total bodily injury judgments.
On average, there are about five judgements a year in Ontario that exceed $500,000.
Assuming settlements follow the same distribution as judgements, and that third party property damage liability risk is proportional to bodily injury risk, the following deductible credits for auto and general liability insurance are indicated.
The deductible credits are more or less those commonly offered by liability insurers.
[1] Compendium of damages awarded in personal injury actions across Ontario; January 1999 – October 2019; the honorable James B. Chadwick, Q.C.; Parisa Khazra (University of Ottawa Law Student); Alex Digiovanni (University of Ottawa Law Student).
[2] 2007: $4,109,137; 2009: $4,193,561; 2013: $3,570,129; 2019: $6,657,966