How To File A Personal Injury Lawsuit With Injury Lawyer In Port Hope
Theoretically speaking, filing a lawsuit for personal injury isn’t very difficult. The foundation idea behind filing a personal injury lawsuit is simple and straightforward i.e. to make both the court as well as the defendant aware of the basis of your lawsuit. Practically, however, it is not as easy for people who do not have any relevant knowledge pertaining to personal injury claims. For those people, having an injury lawyer in Port Hope handle their lawsuit is the best option! This article aims to explain the very fundamental rules of filing a lawsuit for personal injury.
The Official Complaint
Any personal injury lawsuit starts with the filing of a handful of documents to the court and serving the defendant with those papers. In order to explain what you have based your lawsuit on, you are going to require to assemble and file the complaint, also known as “petition”. The complaint can be described as a formal legal piece of document that serves to identify the legal factors that you have based your personal injury claim upon.
● The beginning of the complaint, also known as the “caption”, serves the purpose of identifying the plaintiff, the defendant and the court in which the case is being filed.
● The next part of your complaint should be composed of numbered sentences/paragraphs that explain to the jurisdiction of the court to hear your case, assess your allegations by applying legal theories to them and, the factual description of your lawsuit. You are also going to need to explain the relief and amount of compensation that you are seeking from the defendant.
● The final part of the official complaint will only consist the signature of either you or your personal injury lawyer in Port Hope.
Once you have filed the complaint to the court, all you need to do next is to serve the copy of it to the defendant. It is absolutely essential that you must do this because without proper service, the court cannot have legal jurisdiction over the other party. And if there is no jurisdiction, there cannot be any judgement.
Service of Process
Next part of filing your personal injury claim is to serve the defendant with a copy of the official complaint that you have filed to the court, to let them know they are being sued. This is also known as “service of process” in legal terms. The “service of process” part gets completed when the defendant or their attorney receive the copy of the official document that you sent them.
The Statute of Limitations
What you should keep in mind is that you must file the lawsuit in the court before the expiration of the statute of limitations. Statute of limitations are legal rules that state that lawsuit must be filed within a given amount of time. Once, the statute of limitations expires, you may get barred from ever filing that lawsuit.
Defendant’s Response to the Complaint
Once you and personal injury lawyer in Port Hope are done filing your complaint and the summons report to the court and serving a copy of the same to the defendant, it is the time for the defendant to respond to those documents. This can occur in either of the following possible ways:
● Firstly, the defendant may respond by filing an “answer” to your complaint, through which the defendant tries to respond to each of your numbered allegations against them that you have made in the complaint and may either admit or deny those allegations.
● Secondly, the defendant has the option to file a motion of dismiss - which, if granted, can result in your entire lawsuit being thrown out of court. To read more Click Here