What is the effect of a settlement in a personal injury case?

Settlement money is generally paid by a defendant to eliminate the risks that the plaintiff would not only succeed in his claims at trial, but would recover as much or more than the settlement amount. In most lawsuits that are settled before trial, no trial is ever held, and so no one knows what the court’s judgment would have been. But in my opinion, the fact that the plaintiff seeks to attribute fault to the settling defendants in a subsequent trial against other defendants, and fails, should not change the effect of the settlement. If the plaintiff is not required to account for the settlement monies, I think there would be a double recovery, in violation of a fundamental principle of tort law: Ratych v. Bloomer 1990 CanLII 97 (SCC), [1990] 1 S.C.R. 940; 69 D.L.R. (4th) 25.