The statute of limitations gives injury lawyers in Kitchener and their clients a filing deadline. It states the last day for the filing of a personal injury lawsuit. That statute differs from state to state. Still, in every state, a personal injury lawsuit would be dismissed if the claimant had failed to file by the deadline.
Basic features of statute of limitations
The time period that defines the length of time before the deadline starts on the day of the claimant’s injury. The deadline can be extended under the discovery rule. That rule gets used, if the injured party did not know about the injury, or did not know that the defendant’s actions had caused the injury.
This rule assumes that any claimant would not have to wait for an exceedingly long time, in order to obtain evidence of the fact that the defendant had caused his of her injury. Unfortunately, though, that particular assumption does not prove correct in every situation.
Today, thanks to the creation of new diagnostic tests, doctors face less of a challenge, when trying to determine the reason for a given medical condition. If unaware of the fact that a given patient had been involved in a car accident, a physician would have slight reason to link the same patient’s condition to an unmentioned auto accident.
That would certainly be true, if the patient had seemed in good health during the weeks that preceded a sudden display of the same patient’s previously unrecognized medical condition. It might be that mere mention of a certain fact has managed to alert the patient to a link between the defendant’s actions and the manifestation of a serious medical problem.
Note that diagnosis of a problem does not always reveal the link between the same problem and the defendant’s actions. Hence, the deadline created by the statute of limitations might come and go, before an accident victim has learned all of the case’s significant facts.
Other possible reasons for an extension of the deadline
Judges have been known to extend that endpoint on a given timeline when it has been disclosed that a defendant has left the state for a definite period of time. In that case, the statute of limitations gets suspended, during the defendant’s absence from the state.
Judges also extend deadlines, upon learning that the plaintiff in a personal injury case is a minor, a disabled person, or a mentally ill individual. In cases where the plaintiff is a minor, there is a definite time for the granted extension to get lifted.
Eventually, a minor attains to the age of 18, and becomes an adult. The suspended statute of limitations gets restored, when a minor with a proposed lawsuit has reached the age of 18. Hence, any young adult that has been injured as a minor should give serious consideration to the appropriate state’s deadline.