PLEASE NOTE: This is only for general guidance only, and you should always seek proper advice from a qualified personal injury lawyer to accurately calculate your limitation to claim period.
For the majority of cases in England and Wales, you have three years from the date of an accident in which to make your claim for personal injury compensation. What this normally means is that you must either have settled your claim or issued court proceedings before the three year anniversary of the accident.
Three years may seem like a long time, and can even feel like ages away. But it isn’t…
We all like to procrastinate at times, and putting things off seems much easier than actually doing it. When it comes to making a claim, people’s wariness about lawyers puts them off even more. But as each day goes by, the window of opportunity you have to claim shortens; and although you have three years, it can be very destructive to leave things until the last minute. In fact, it can even be destructive to leave it for longer than a year.
To help you understand why, I will explain what happens when it comes to the date approaching:
Protecting the Claim
If the date is approaching and the claim cannot be settled, than the only alternative is to issue court proceedings. Normally these will be what we call protective proceedings, and we will instruct the court that we have lodged the claim for the sole purpose of protecting the claim from the limitation period.
But issuing court proceedings also triggers a minefield of deadlines which, if missed, can result in your claim being struck out – which means you may be unable to continue with it at all.
The first is that you only have four months from the date of issue to ‘Serve’ the claim which means providing the other side with detailed information about why you hold them at fault, what laws you are relying on, and importantly, evidence to support your claim. The main evidence is a medical report from an expert that is used to support your injury claim, and documentation in support of losses, like wage slips for lost earnings.
Generally speaking, if you do not have that evidence by the time the claim needs to be served, it probably can’t be relied upon. Adherence to court deadlines has recently become even more strict, and failing to comply with the rules of the court can simply mean that you end up in a mess where you have no evidence to support your claim and you are not allowed to just go and get some and give it to the other side.
We can ask the court to ‘Stay’ the claim which means that the four month deadline is extended. This is normally a reasonable request, as we only issued the claim because of the three year limitation date. But the courts are always working to backlogs, and it can take months for a Judge to finally see an application we have made to them to produce a Court Order that confirms the claim is Stayed until a future date.
You need the court’s permission for all this kind of stuff.
With the rules getting tighter, who is to say that a Judge won’t look at your case and decide that you have simply left things too late and you are wasting the courts time by making a claim so late in the day that we needed to issue court proceedings? It could happen – the courts are very much about justice fairly distributed, and they may see your laid back attitude to making a claim as a waste of their time.
We do have enquiries from people calling us that are days or weeks away from the limitation expiry. Everyone has their reasons, and we appreciate that family matters or concerns when working for an employer can delay you actually initiating a claim. But ultimately, there is very little reasoning the courts may listen to if you try and justify why you have not claimed immediately.
What we have to do is decide whether we are prepared and able to fund your claim and get it ready for issuing as soon as possible. If it’s just a few days away, we would probably feel it’s too dangerous for us to accept your case as it can take some time.
The Lesson is Simple
The choice as to whether you want to go through with a claim is entirely yours. But if you are going to do it, do it as soon as you possibly can. We appreciate there may be genuine reasons as to why you don’t wish to start a claim right away, but ultimately you’re in a much safer position starting it immediately.