“I can’t sue my husband.”
We hear this time and time again in motor vehicle accident claims. Husband, wife, son, daughter, best friend. It’s painful and misses the point of liability insurance.
We don’t buy automobile insurance to protect ourselves from being sued. We buy it to protect the people we hurt from having the carry the burden of their injury alone.
Injury sustained in a car accident comes with all sorts of costs: loss of quality of life, loss of income, the cost of medical care, attendant care, the cost of home modifications. No one can possibly carry the burden of these costs alone. Our liability insurance is there to help innocent victims of our mistakes.
Why in heavens name would anyone think such protection should only be available to strangers? We purchase liability insurance not only to protect strangers but also to protect our loved ones. If you are injured when your husband is driving, injured because he has made a mistake, and we all make them, then you not only can sue your husband, you must.
You and your husband have paid premiums to a large multinational corporation. An insurance company. It is in the business of paying compensation to the innocent victims of negligence. Auto insurance is a business. The insurance company has your money, the premiums you’ve paid faithfully and on time every month for years. It wasn’t uncomfortable taking your premium payments. It invested your money. Those investments have produced gains and dividends. The insurance company will pay its staff, its overhead and meritorious claims. The rest of the money, all of it, is profit. The profit goes to the company. To shareholders.
There’s nothing wrong with an insurance company making profit. Thank goodness they do, or they wouldn’t exist and wouldn’t be there when we need them…like in the case where your husband has accidentally injured you.
You have a choice.
If your husband makes an error while driving, and you are injured, you can:
- make a claim for fair compensation; or
- you can make a charitable donation to the shareholders of your multinational automobile insurance company.
What Fair Compensation Really Means
Fair compensation includes General Damages for pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life. Many injuries leave invisible scars. Impacts on your life that can’t be seen on the surface of your skin, or by the way you walk. Not every car accident injury causes a limp. A good personal injury lawyer will dig beneath the surface and see the impact of depression, inability to concentrate, and fatigue. Pain doesn’t have to be excruciating to be life-changing. Daily, constant and unremitting pain, even at a low level, can destroy your quality of life. General Damages compensate for this loss.
Fair compensation includes Special Damages for loss of income and out-of-pocket expenses. Special Damages are meant to pay for anything that we can calculate mathematically.
Oftentimes, we don’t incur an expense, even when we should. Think about housekeeping chores. You and your partner met, fell in love, and formed a household. You didn’t jump into marriage. You considered what your life would look like. He’d do the outside work, you’d the inside work, or something along those lines. You’d share the work of running a home. You formed a social contract. Now that you’re injured, you can no longer carry your share of the load. Maybe you can still manage the work, but now it takes four times as long, you have to take breaks and it’s not getting done very well. Because you’re taking longer to do it, you’re eating into the time you once spent reading or walking or knitting, anything but doing chores. The point is, you can still do the work, but you’re paying a social or existential price for doing so. You shouldn’t have to. Fair compensation should mean that you’re entitled to hire assistance, a housekeeper, to assist with the tasks negatively impacted by collision-related injury and impairment.
There’s a lot more to fair compensation, but those are two simple examples.
When you make a claim for compensation and your husband (or wife, son, or daughter) is the defendant, the process is simple. The driver reports the accident to your insurance company. You call an injury lawyer. The driver cooperates with the insurance company in the defence of the claim. You work faithfully with your injury lawyer. The driver doesn’t talk with you about the work the insurance company is doing. You don’t talk to your family member about what the injury lawyer is doing. It hard to avoid sometimes. By way of example, your lawyer may send you to be assessed by a medical expert and you need your husband to drive. No need to be mysterious about it.
Maintaining Dignity During the Claim Process
Insurance adjusters and injury lawyers manage these types of claims every day. Our goal at Bergeron Clifford Injury Lawyers is to carry ALL parties to an injury claim through the process with their dignity intact. We’re extra sensitive in situations like this, where family members must bring claims against other family members.
Bringing a claim against a family member does not make you a bad person. Failing to bring a claim against a family member when your family needs the financial support is short-sighted. Your insurance company is in the business of paying meritorious claims. If you decide not to bring a claim because it will cause friction or hurt feelings in your house, your insurance company won’t mind keeping your money. It doesn’t mind taking your charitable donation. It will call the money profit, not charity, but at least there won’t be any hurt feelings at home.
If you and a family member are struggling over whether to bring a claim in similar circumstances, please send them this blog post.
About the Author
Ted Bergeron is a Queen’s University graduate with degrees in Physical Education, Arts, Education and Law.
Ted’s legal career started in insurance defence litigation. He worked at a boutique law firm in Toronto, servicing only insurance companies. He switched to representing only injured clients and their families in 1995. He knows both sides of the system inside and out.
