This is one of the most common questions I hear here at The Injury Lawyers – you’ve been injured in an accident through no fault of your own, and you want to know if you have the right to make a claim for compensation.
The answer is simple – find out by calling us today, and we can usually tell you within minutes if you have a claim or not. However, if you are not quite sure about calling us yet (although there’s nothing to worry about – our advice is on a no obligation basis, and we certainly don’t bite!), read this little help article for you below and we may be able to answer some of the questions you have relating to whether you have a claim for compensation of not.
When Can You Make a Claim for Compensation?
English / Welsh law is pretty good for making sure that justice is served, and the victims of injustice are recompensed for any adversities they have to go through. If you are injured in an accident that was caused by the fault of someone else, you have ticked the first box in making a claim for compensation.
You may be partially at fault, and you can still claim. The primary rule is that there must be someone else at fault. That classically overused term that is now somewhat a parody in everyday life “where there’s blame, there’s a claim” is actually, in essence, an accurate statement to make. If you were injured in an accident where there is no one to blame, it is likely you cannot make a claim.
It’s all about the law of tort – if you have been negligently wronged by someone else, they are responsible for compensating you for any suffering you have had to go through. If the circumstances surrounding how you became injured were both foreseeable and preventable, there is probably a legal duty that someone has to have to make sure that it never occurs. Breaking this legal duty of care that is owed to you is when you have the legal entitlement to make a claim.
Has Someone Breached Their Duty of Care for You?
There are many people who owe each other a duty of care. If you drive, you owe every other road user and pedestrian on the highway a duty of care to ensure you do not harm anyone. It’s the same for other drivers on the road who owe you the same duty of care. It’s the reason we have driving tests exist and licenses are issued to those who are deemed to be able to safely uphold the duty of care that is expected of each other on the roads.
At work, your employer owes you a duty of care to do absolutely everything they can to make sure you are never harmed in the workplace. This is why there are countless amounts of Health and Safety Rules and Regulations that your employers are legally bound to uphold to ensure you are never harmed in the line of duty at work. Risk Assessments, training, re-training, inspection checks, maintenance checks, etc, are just a short number of methods your employers should use to uphold all of the rules and regulations they must legally abide by.
Even in a shop, the owners of the premises must do all they can to ensure you are never harmed on their premises. The council has the same duty to look after your safety when you are using the highways as well.
If someone has breached the duty of care that is owed to you, it’s likely you can make a claim against them for their negligent actions. Negligence is normally unintentional; John Smith didn’t mean to drive in to the back of your car – he just wasn’t paying enough due care and attention when he failed to notice your car stop at the edge of a roundabout junction. Huge Supermarket Stores Limited didn’t mean to fail to inspect their premises often enough for liquid spillages, causing you to fall the ground; but they didn’t do enough to prevent it from happening. Factories Limited didn’t mean to not train you in how to use a dangerous conveyer belt where there were no emergency stop buttons accessible for you, and the working practice you were instructed to do was unsafe; but they have failed you.
For the majority of compensation claims, it is not malice aforethought or some intentional attempt to hurt you; someone somewhere just wasn’t doing what is expected of them to ensure no one is accidentally hurt or injured.
How to Make a Claim
If you believe you fit the above criteria, you need to give us a call so we can hopefully confirm to you that you have a good claim for compensation, and we can certainly help you out. However, just because we think you have a good claim does not mean that you have a definite claim in many circumstances.
If you were correctly proceeding in your car and someone smashed in to the back of your car, or if you were a passenger in a collision, it’s more than likely that you have a definite claim for compensation. The circumstances speak for themselves; you clearly weren’t at fault – someone else was. In this kind of scenario, we are more than confident that you have a definite claim.
If you are injured at work because you have never been trained how to safely clean a dangerous piece of machinery, which was allowed to be switched on whilst you were cleaning it, and you could not stop the machinery due to there being no accessible emergency stop buttons, you again have a pretty much dead cert claim.
However, if you slip or trip at work, whilst in a privately owned premises open to the public, or whilst out and about, we can take your claim on, but we do not at that stage know if you have a definite claim or not. It takes investigation with the other side, and it takes documentary evidence that they may hold, which can either prove or disprove that a duty of care owed to you has been breached.
If we believe that you have a good enough chance of winning your claim, we will take your case on under our Genuine No Win, No Fee agreement. This means that we are agreeing to take the risk of your case on under the premise that, if it unfortunately loses, we will write all of our fees off, and you will not pay a penny to us at all. So yes – we do lose money on claims we don’t win. But that’s the nature of our Genuine No Win, No Fee; we take a case on based on how confident we are that we can make it a winner.
This also means that you know we will fight our hardest for a winning claim. If you win your case, you will always receive 100% of your compensation claim with our agreement. Most standard No Win, No Fee agreements usually leave your solicitor with the duty to ‘try’ and recover their legal fees from the other side, as is our entitlement under law. Ours goes the extra mile and states that we will never charge you anything we fail to recover from the other side. So, you are actually guaranteed 100% compensation!
What to do Now?
Simple – call us on 0800 634 75 75.
We will:
- Tell you in minutes if we think you have a claim.
- Advise you as to how we work and what we do to make sure you get nothing less than the greatest level or service possible for a law firm to offer
- Discuss any private treatment needs we can arrange for you – at no cost to you
- Get your claim set up and started today if you are happy for is to do so
It really is quite simple!
