Matt Lalande

Matt Lalande is a Hamilton personal injury and long-term disability lawyer with more than 20 years of experience representing catastrophically injured people and their families across Ontario. As founder of Lalande Personal Injury & Disability Lawyers, he has recovered over $35 million in compensation for clients dealing with brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, amputations, denied disability claims, and wrongful death.

Law runs in his family. Matt comes from a line of trial lawyers and judges practising as far back as 1973. He earned his law degree at the University of Ottawa, articled in 2003, and has been serving the Hamilton community ever since. Before opening his own firm, he gained personal injury experience with several well-respected Ontario practices — an education in how insurance companies build files, which is the same knowledge he now uses to take them apart.

Matt has deliberately kept his practice narrow. The firm handles five areas of law: serious personal injury, wrongful death, injured children, denied long-term disability, and wrongful dismissal. It is a selective approach rather than a volume one (the opposite of a settlement mill) and it means Matt remains the principal lawyer on every file he takes. Others may assist, but he oversees the work.

That focus shows in the results. A $2.7 million recovery for a young man who suffered dual amputations in a motorcycle collision. $2 million for a woman with severe brain trauma from a T-bone crash. $1.3 million for a young man with a spinal cord injury, $1.2 million for a six-year-old boy struck by a truck while riding his scooter, and hundreds of other settlements for injured cyclists, pedestrians, disability claimants, and grieving families.

Matt is a member of the Law Society of Ontario, the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association, and the American Association for Justice, and is a former OTLA director. He has been named by his peers among Canada's best personal injury lawyers every year since 2018 and is consistently voted one of Hamilton's best by the community he practises in.

He is also one of the more published voices in the field. Matt is co-writer of Disability Insurance Law in Canada, a text used by lawyers and judges across the country in long-term disability litigation, and has written and spoken for over 100 publications and events — including The Lawyer's Daily, First Reference Employment Law, and the Globe and Mail's Leadership Lab column. He is a former member of the Oakville Trafalgar Hospital Ethics Committee and a former writer and co-chair of The Litigator magazine.

Consultations at Lalande Personal Injury & Disability Lawyers are always free, and the firm works on contingency — no upfront fees, no cost unless there is a recovery, and case expenses advanced on the client's behalf. For anyone in Hamilton or across Ontario facing a life-changing injury, a denied disability claim, or the loss of a loved one, Matt Lalande offers experienced representation and a direct line to the lawyer actually running the file.