A BC defense lawyer is happy to see the province’s Supreme Court rule against Attorney General David Eby’s cap on experts and reports in injury collision cases.

Acumen Law’s Kyla Lee says it didn’t make a lot of sense that you could only have a certain number of experts in the first place. “If you have different types of injuries to different parts of your body, naturally you’re going to need different experts to talk about how those injuries effect you, you’re going experts to talk about financial losses as a result of each of the injuries. It didn’t make sense when you actually think about how people can become injured in car accidents to just arbitrarily set a limit.”

Lee believes this will actually help speed up the court process. She says soon as you limit what people can do in their litigation, you ultimately slow down litigation. “When you have the ability to have more experts, you get a better evidentiary foundation for the court to explain the issue. So it’s less time spent hearing a plaintiff testify about how bad their foot injury is because you have the objective evidence from someone who’s an expert in foot injuries.”

Lee says although she has never seen a situation where people have abused the unlimited use of experts and reports, she has heard of cases where it happened. “As with anything, there are going to be people who take advantage of the absence of caps on something or take advantage of loose rules and abuse the system. You can’t weed that out by imposing an arbitrary rule because those people are then going to bring the applications trying to get the court to exercise their discretion to go around the rule.” People who are behaving badly in the system will continue to do so regardless of the rules she said. “They’re going to waste resources in other ways.”

The province can still appeal the ruling or it could draft new legislation to present.