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Traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, amputation, severe burns · QC
Catastrophic and brain injury in Québec
For automobile injuries there is no lawsuit at all — the province pays, and the fight is about entitlement.
These files are decided by the quality of the team assembled in the first ninety days — not by anything that happens in a courtroom years later.
Provincial detail verified 2026-05-01
Three years
The Civil Code of Québec sets a three-year prescription for most bodily-injury actions. SAAQ claims and reviews run on their own statutory deadlines, which are considerably shorter.
Not the same case twice
Catastrophic files are a different profession. The damages are built by life-care planners, occupational therapists, physiatrists, economists and vocational experts, and the firm’s real skill is knowing which experts are credible, ordering the right assessments in the right sequence, and funding all of it while the family has no income. Firms that run high-volume soft-tissue practices are not equipped for this, and the good ones will tell you so.
Short fuses in Québec
The deadlines that end claims long before the limitation period does
These are provincial and they are short. Whether any of them apply to your facts is a legal question — which is the reason we ask about them in the first ten minutes.
- SAAQ claims and each level of review carry firm filing deadlines; a missed review window is usually fatal to that decision.
- Municipal claims under Québec law carry short prior-notice requirements.
What changes the match
Facts that move a catastrophic and brain injury file to a different practitioner
Whether a catastrophic designation is available
In provinces with a formal catastrophic impairment category, that designation unlocks dramatically higher benefit limits. Securing it is a technical, evidence-heavy application with its own timing.
Capacity and substitute decision-making
If the injured person cannot instruct counsel, someone must be appointed. That process runs alongside the claim and needs to be handled with dignity, not as paperwork.
Age at injury
A twenty-four-year-old and a sixty-four-year-old with identical injuries have completely different future-care and lost-earning-capacity claims, and need different expert teams.
Firm capital
A properly built catastrophic file costs six figures in disbursements before it resolves. Ask any firm directly whether they fund that themselves. Some borrow against your file at interest.
Home and family circumstances
Attendant care provided by a spouse or parent is compensable and routinely under-claimed because nobody kept records. It has to be set up correctly from week one.
- Québec is a civil-law jurisdiction with its own bar, its own procedure and its own vocabulary. Cross-border "national" firms are usually the wrong answer here.
- Service in French is not a preference to be accommodated — for most files it is the baseline.
Worth doing now
Early moves that decide how this file ends
- Immediate expert retention while the clinical picture is being formed, not after it has stabilised.
- Documenting the family’s unpaid care from the outset, in a form that will survive scrutiny.
- Interim benefit and advance-payment applications so the household does not collapse financially before the claim resolves.
If your file is genuinely catastrophic, there are a small number of firms in your province who should be running it. That is the entire reason this service exists, and it is the category where the difference between the right and wrong choice is measured in millions and in decades of care.
Ten minutes gets you one name for a Québec catastrophic and brain injury file
The intake asks the Québec-specific questions above, reads back what it sees, and nothing reaches any firm until you say go.
Same claim, other provinces
InjuryLawyerNearMe.ca is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice, legal opinions, or legal representation. We are an independent matching service. Nothing on this site creates a solicitor-client relationship. Deadlines and entitlements depend on facts we cannot assess from a web page — speak to a lawyer promptly.