Of course each claim for a missed limitation represents real costs to the individual lawyer involved too, including insurance surcharges, lost profits, time thrown away, added stress, and assault on his or her reputation. It's not that these lawyers missed some obscure or unusual limitation - mostly it was the standard two years to file or one year to serve limitation. I've dug through our insurance claim files to see if I can understand what's happening, and I pretty quickly discerned some patterns. Interestingly, these patterns repeat in other provinces and in other countries.
Malpractice everywhere results from the same causes.
Let me tell you three stories from our files and see if you recognize one of the patterns. A lawyer represented a passenger in a car that was rear-ended. The lawyer had a new, computerized limitations system. He entered the deadline for filing the statement of claim in his computer as November 10 instead of October 11. The computer automatically reminded him to pull the file three months before the entered date, two months before the entered date, and one month before the entered date.