ICBC.com

Your settlement

The settlement process

When you want to talk about compensation, you simply contact your adjuster and ask to have your claim evaluated. Your adjuster will consider medical reports from your health care advisor, the impact the injuries had on your lifestyle, our history of similar settlements and court cases. Once the evaluation is completed, your adjuster will contact you.

Evaluation of your claim is a two-step process.

Your adjuster must first determine if you are entitled to compensation.
If you are entitled to compensation, your adjuster considers all the facts of your case and your individual situation, calculates how much your settlement should be worth, and presents you with an offer.

How the settlement is calculated

There are a number of factors that may affect your settlement offer. The most important include:

Whether you were found at fault, either partly or 100%, for the crash in which you were injured
How much you were earning prior to the crash
Whether you were unable to work afterward
Whether you had to spend money on expenses related to your injury
How much your injury kept you from being able to enjoy your regular activities.

Your adjuster can let you know if there are other factors affecting your claim.

Here's a fictional example of how settlements vary depending upon whether or not a driver is found to be at fault in a crash. And here's another fictional example demonstrating how individual circumstances can affect the size of an ICBC settlement.

Research other settlements

As a first step in negotiating a settlement with your adjuster you may want to research the settlements other people have received. Here's how:

On the internet

On the Internet, you can choose the button "Search JDB" on the B.C. Superior Courts and B.C. Provincial Courts websites for injury judgments. When researching judgments, you should realize two things:

It can take as long as two years before a motor vehicle case can go to court;
When you see a judgment amount, you should realize that up to one-third of that amount was likely paid to a lawyer for contingency fees.

If you'd like to search the Supreme Court records, here are some tips that might help you.

At libraries

You can research court judgments in publications such as B.C. Civil Decisions, B.C. Weekly Law Digest and Civil Decisions, published by the Continuing Legal Education Society of B.C. Other publications include Assessment of Personal Injury Damages, Personal Injury Damage Assessments in B.C. and Goldsmith's Damages for Personal Injury and Death in Canada.