The majority of people out there will make their claim for compensation as a form of financial recompense for having to suffer through long periods of pain and injury. It’s only fair; it’s not nice being injured, and it has an impact on your everyday life both at work and at home. You will also be able to claim back any reasonable losses, such as lost earnings, treatment fees, and travel costs.
So it comes as no surprise that the question on many of our clients’ lips is “when will I get my payout?”
The thing is, the wheels of litigation can often turn quite slowly. Investigations need to be made, evidence needs to be obtained and compiled, and negotiations must take place. Whilst the system we have in England is pretty good for making sure claims are concluded quickly, lots of things need to be done.
You can think of your claim in stages, which will help you to understand the process and understand when you will likely receive your payout:
Firstly, your Injury Lawyer needs to compile as much information as possible in preparation for sending the Letter of Claim (or Claim Notification Form in most road accidents) to the other side. Once the claim is initiated with the Defendant, for road accidents they will normally have a period of 15 business days in which to confirm whether they believe they are responsible for the accident or not, or just short of 4 months for most other claims.
This period of time is in place to allow the other side to investigate the circumstances of your accident with the aim to reach an informed decision as to whether they believe they are duty bound to compensate you. However, this time frame can end up being extended to make sure we allow the other side to reasonably investigate the matter, or could be extended if the claim is redirected to another Defendant; e.g. if a council advises the responsibility is with a private company, or another council.
If the other side try and defend your claim, then we are facing a much longer period of time. The problem is that many Defendants will try and defend a claim if they think they can; even if they know they were at fault. This, sadly, drags out the process, and will involve your lawyers doing all the work necessary to fight your case and hopefully get them to overturn their decision or place the case in front of a judge to make the decision. This can take years – but is not necessarily a common thing to happen.
Once the other side has held their hands up and will pay out for your claim, we now must send you to see one of our expert medico-legal experts to produce a report for us to value your claim. The report will also confirm any treatment or further medical investigation that is needed. Whilst the turnaround for an appointment to a report can be relatively short (unless it’s held up by the NHS during the process of accessing your medical records), you may end up needing treatment or another report. If you need treatment for three months, this will normally prolong the case.
You have a duty to do all you reasonably can to help yourself to get better; if you need treatment it is wise to accept it. So you see, the claim could take much longer, but it’s all for your benefit.
I often tell people that most straightforward road accident claims can take between four and six months, and most other claims can generally take between six and 9 months. But, what if your claim is redirected to another Defendant? What if they try and initially defend it? What if you need treatment? What if you need further medical assessments? These things can happen, and need to be done.
How Can I Get Paid Faster?
There is one thing you can do to make your claim much faster. Instruct a specialist firm of personal injury lawyers with years and years of experience in dealing with accident claims with a quality service agreement in place. For example, if you have an experienced injury lawyer representing you, they are better prepared for any eventuality to move your case forward as efficiently as possible. The service can help as well – for example, we update our client every 14 days, which means we work on our clients’ files more regularly, so issues can be resolved at a faster rate.
It’s important to remember that even when your cheque has arrived at the office, the insurers could have stupidly put it in to our name as oppose to yours; something that seems to be on the increase in recent years. Whether this is through sheer laziness, or just to annoy lawyers, we don’t know. But the problem it causes is that we have to bank the cheque in our Client Account and then either BACS is to our client or send a cheque ourselves. With a business account, this can take some time; but it’s a safe process; under the Solicitors Accounts Rules we must have a separate account for Client payments, so don’t worry, we don’t sit on cheques for gaining 0.00000000000000000000001p interest! It wouldn’t be worth it even if we wanted to – irrelevant of what some clients do sadly think…
Just make sure to remain patient when your claim is going through the motions unless you seriously suspect your solicitor is holding things up! If you get an expert injury lawyer with a quality service level, you should be OK as long as you remember that on occasions, things do sadly take time.
We wish we could get your payout in days! But that would just be impossible unfortunately…
