Representative Experience
Personal Injury
Rob regularly acts as counsel on matters involving all types of personal injury, including catastrophic injury claims, arising in the context of product, professional, occupiers’, commercial host, and motor vehicle liability.
Rob has handled and successfully resolved innumerable occupiers’ liability, product liability, professional liability and motor vehicle claims throughout his entire career. He regularly acts on, and supervises, all levels of such claims ranging from slip and falls on residential premises, to catastrophic injury resulting from property and product failures, to damage from incorrect medication dispense.
As a result, Rob has developed extensive knowledge and expertise relating to many medical conditions and injuries, ranging from minor soft tissue injuries to severe and permanently disabling injuries such as paralysis, brain injury, chronic pain and psychiatric disorders. As a result, Rob has developed a deep understanding of the necessary factual and expert evidence required to successfully defend such cases.
Rob’s most recent personal injury trial success was the dismissal of a very high value claim arising out of a motor vehicle accident: Helgason v. Rondeau, 2022 BCSC 1130.
Product Liability
Rob handles a wide variety of product liability cases for retailers, distributors, and manufacturers.
He has extensive expertise with the legal and practical issues associated with product manufacturing, distribution, retail sales, use and failure. He also has detailed knowledge regarding the effects of product failure, including personal injury, property damage and economic loss, and the requirements to successfully analyze and defend, or prosecute, a product liability action.
Professional Liability
Rob regularly represents and defends professionals in negligence claims. He acts for professionals in a variety of fields, including defending liability claims against pharmacists and real estate appraisers. Rob’s successes for professionals includes an important decision of the Court of Appeal respecting the enforcement of limitation of liability provisions in professional service agreements: Kokanee Mortgage M.I.C Ltd. v. Burrell, 2018 BCCA 151.
Rob also frequently represents and defends pharmacists, other pharmacy professionals and pharmacy operators in disciplinary and related proceedings with the College of Pharmacists of BC.
Trial Experience and Advocacy
Rob has appeared many times as counsel in the British Columbia Supreme Court and Court of Appeal and in the Federal Court of Canada and Federal Court of Appeal.
Rob has participated in hundreds of mediations and has extensive training in mediation skills and advocacy.
Rob also frequently conducts seminars for lawyers and students through the firm’s internal ASCEND™ program, and for law students at the University of British Columbia on the litigation skills required for effective advocacy and case management/resolution.
