Insurance
Private mediation, not the Tribunal's case conference.
Accident benefits disputes are high in volume, tightly regulated, and unglamorous enough to be worth doing properly. The distinction in that headline is the one to be clear about before anyone retains me.
What comes up
The disputes.
Disputes between an insured person and an insurer under the Statutory Accident Benefits Schedule.
- Entitlement and quantum
- Whether a benefit is payable at all, and if so how much — the two questions the statutory scheme is built around.
- Minor injury designation
- Whether an impairment falls inside the minor injury definition, and the monetary limit that follows if it does.
- Treatment and assessment plans
- Denied or partially approved plans, competing assessments, and disputes about the reasonableness and necessity of proposed treatment.
- Catastrophic impairment
- The determination itself, and the very different limits that turn on it.
- Income replacement
- Eligibility, quantum, and the evidentiary disputes about pre-accident earnings and post-accident capacity.
- Insurer repayment claims
- Overpayment and repayment disputes brought by an insurer rather than by the insured person.
The forum
Where these disputes go, and what I am not.
Worth stating precisely, because the vocabulary invites a misunderstanding.
The Tribunal has exclusive jurisdiction. Section 280 of the Insurance Act sends disputes about an insured person's entitlement to statutory accident benefits, or the amount of them, to the Licence Appeal Tribunal, and bars a proceeding in any court other than an appeal or judicial review. The accident-benefits division is the Automobile Accident Benefits Service.
Its case conference is the Tribunal's own, and I am not appointed to it. The Tribunal's settlement step is a case conference led by one of its adjudicators, who does not then sit on the hearing panel unless the parties consent. It is sometimes called a pre-hearing, which is the Tribunal's own label for it. A privately retained neutral does not conduct it and cannot be appointed to it, and nothing on this page should be read as offering that.
What I offer is private mediation. Retained by the parties, on their own terms, under an agreement to mediate they sign. The Tribunal's accident-benefits page names mediation as something to consider before applying: under the heading "Consider other ways to resolve your dispute", it says that before you apply, you may want to consider negotiation or mediation services.
That quotation is about mediation before an application is filed, and it is quoted no wider than it goes. Sourced in docs/reference/lat-case-conference.md, which carries the full passage and a correction to an earlier reading of it.
The scheme
Everything here runs off one regulation.
The Schedule is the source. The Statutory Accident Benefits Schedule is O. Reg. 34/10 under the Insurance Act, and it sets both the benefits and their limits. "Minor injury" and "Minor Injury Guideline" are both defined terms in section 3 of the Schedule, and the monetary limit on medical and rehabilitation benefits for a predominantly minor injury is set by section 18 of the Schedule itself.
Which is why these files reward a neutral who reads it. The arguments that actually move an accident-benefits mediation are about which provision governs, what the assessments say against it, and where the file sits on a two-year clock. That is a documentary exercise before it is a persuasion exercise.
Described so the scheme is legible, not applied to anyone's file. The Schedule was amended with effect from 1 July 2026; this page cites no figure, and how any provision bears on a particular claim is a question for each party's own counsel. Sourced in docs/reference/ontario-sabs-lat.md.
The context
The volume is the argument.
Tribunals Ontario reported 16,002 accident-benefit appeals received by the Licence Appeal Tribunal in the fiscal year ending 31 March 2025, and 12,081 case conferences held. It also reported that the average time from application to an oral hearing fell from 437 to 332 days over that year.
Those are the Tribunal's numbers about its own docket, not mine about my practice. They are here because they describe the problem: a very large number of disputes moving through a process whose hearing dates still sat the better part of a year out after a year of improvement. Private mediation is one thing that changes that arithmetic for a particular file.
Published figures for the fiscal year ending 31 March 2025, from the Tribunals Ontario annual report. A more recent report may exist — re-check before relying on these as current. Sourced in docs/reference/ontario-sabs-lat.md.
The process
And how it would run.
The area is the subject matter. The process is what the parties are choosing between, and each of these describes one — the formats, the rules, and what a party is expected to do and when.
Next step
Start with a call.
Tell me the shape of the matter and who is involved, and I will tell you whether I am the right neutral for it. Inquiries are answered within two business days.