On April 1, 2019, the CRT will start resolving many motor vehicle accident (MVA) personal injury disputes in British Columbia. This will include determinations of whether an injury is a “minor injury”, disputes about accident benefits, and disputes about damages and fault up to $50,000.
We’re working hard to implement these new areas of jurisdiction, and we’ll be reporting on our progress in a series of blog posts. These posts highlight aspects of our team’s hard work behind the scenes.
Solution Explorer
The Solution Explorer is the first step in the CRT dispute process. It asks you a series of questions to help classify your dispute. It gives you free legal information, self-help tools, and options for what you can do next. If you can’t resolve your dispute on your own, and the dispute may be within the CRT’s jurisdiction, then you can make a claim application right from the Solution Explorer.
We’ve finished developing the content for MVA personal injury disputes, with the help of volunteer personal injury lawyers and other experts. For 2 weeks in January, we’re running a limited beta test of this content for stakeholders and community legal advocates. We will run a larger, public beta test in February to give everyone an opportunity to provide feedback.
Technology Update
In our November update, we outlined some major updates to both our claim application process and the Tribunal Decision Process (TDP). We continue to build the CRT technology in stages, to allow us to carefully test new features before implementing them.
We recently finished developing the online claim application forms for these new MVA personal injury disputes. Extensive user testing was done to ensure the forms are easy to understand and use.
We’re also making improvements to our website. Soon we will have a landing page for Motor Vehicle Injury disputes, and will be adding more information leading up to April 1, 2019. We’ll also be adding direct links to login or respond to a dispute, and a FAQ page with quick answers to the most frequently-asked questions we get here at the CRT.
CRT Operations
Internally, we continue to prepare for April 1 by recruiting new tribunal members and a Vice Chair for this area of jurisdiction, and hiring more staff. (The Vice-Chair competition closes on January 29, 2019.) We’ll also be making changes to our phone system to serve you better.