How will the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Impact my Halifax Injury Claim?
Like most of society right now, the Courts in Nova Scotia have been impacted by the Coronavirus (“COVID-19”). Many of you have reached out to ask about how COVID-19 will impact your personal injury claims at Valent Legal. The purpose of this blog post is to answer some of the frequently asked questions about COVID-19, your claims and more importantly, help put your minds at ease.
With respect to our ability to work on your file, your personal injury claim will be largely unaffected.
Valent Legal is still open and continuing to work hard on your case. We take social distancing very seriously, so the majority of our staff is working remotely. We are ensuring that we only have the absolute fewest staff members in office at any given time. You can still call us anytime (902-708-5438 or 902-443-4488) or e-mail us anytime ().
For any new clients wanting to speak to a member of our legal team but worried about coming into the office, we are more than willing to conduct our initial consult over skype, facetime, zoom, or another video chat service.
Because our lawyers and staff can utilize cloud-based technology to work remotely, the impact that COVID-19 should have on your files is minimal. And because we have staff in the office, whatever we can’t do remotely (like faxing or printing documents), we’ll always have someone available who can handle the physical necessities of managing your file at Valent Legal.
Where we might start to experience some delay on matters is regarding the parts of claims that must be done in person. A good example of this is discovery examinations. Discovery examinations require the parties, their lawyers, and the court reporter all to be present so that the examination can proceed under oath. While there are some exceptions (i.e. video link discoveries), there really isn’t any practical way to conduct discovery and engage in social distancing. Therefore, for safety reasons, most discovery examinations are currently being rescheduled to the summer or fall 2020.
Another potential delay that may occur which could impact your claim is acquiring your medical records. This is fairly straightforward. Our healthcare professionals are on the front lines, saving lives from COVID-19. Document production is not at the forefront of many treatment provider’s minds at the moment. That doesn’t mean we won’t do everything we can to acquire your medical records in a timely and comprehensive fashion. But from a purely practical and pragmatic perspective, there will inevitably cause some delays in acquiring documents.
Simply put, we’re doing everything we can to continue to provide you with the high level of quality service and advocacy our clients have come to expect from Valent Legal. We’re all working hard for our clients, and COVID-19 hasn’t changed that. While there will be some delays which are unavoidable, we continue to take all measures to minimize the impacts on our clients. The world keeps moving, and the files keep progressing. We’re adapting to make sure the impact on our clients is minimal.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to one of our experienced personal injury lawyers at Valent Legal.
