Today the Guardian published an article by Yvonne Roberts called “Car Crash, Baby” in which Journalist Yvonne Roberts writes about her involvement in a road traffic accident, personal injury lawyers encouraging her to claim for whiplash within minutes of her accident and her own insurance company informing Yvonne, “that since there were no witnesses, the costs will probably be split 50:50 ”.
Its unfortunate for Yvonne that this scenario played out this way and I’m glad she wasn’t seriously hurt. But she doesn’t paint Injury Lawyers in a very good light and in fact even implies that she is being coaxed into feigning injury: “it’s possible that in the course of a week I might have a delayed seizure or, I might have finessed the symptoms of whiplash – certainly the lawyers are giving me enough encouragement:”.
I’m sorry Yvonne that you were receiving these type of calls but not all Personal Injury Lawyers carry out that behaviour, we certainly don’t!
The other thing that I did notice was that Yvonne was contacted by an Injury Lawyer minutes after phoning the AA. Where was the call to the Police? We advise anyone involved in a car accident to phone the Police and do not leave the scene until they appear. Yvonne claims there were no witnesses at the scene but if the Police had been called they would have statements from both parties that would have helped with her insurance claim. How do we know that Yvonne isn’t the one who was on the wrong side of the road. She claims that she has been driving for years and the young man just three months passed his test but it still doesn’t prove anything.
Lastly, can I just ask Yvonne why the headline “Car Crash, Baby”? In online marketing we call this linkbait (a controversial headline or article written for the sole purpose of creating a noise about an event, a product or service etc…) I’ll admit it worked because when I saw the headline in my RSS feed – I clicked – but it is rather naughty, don’t you think?
