Not only is it extremely embarrassing, but the injuries that you can end up with if you sit on a chair or a stool and it simply collapses beneath you can be serious. If this happens in a public place like a shopping centre, supermarket, cafe, restaurant, bar, or pub (to name a few), you may be able to make a claim for personal injury compensation.
What we need to do is get to the bottom as to exactly how and why this has happened.
The Law
The Occupiers Liability Act places an important duty on those responsible for public places like the above to take all reasonable steps to prevent a person from being injured. The most common reasonable steps are systems of inspection and maintenance, and replacing old furniture that is potentially on its way out.
If a chair breaks or a defect is spotted, it should be taken out of use immediately. If it isn’t, and you sit on it only for it to collapse and injure you, I’d say that’s a failure to take all reasonable steps to prevent an injury.
At the same time, if they never inspect their furniture and / or have no system to maintain them, we could argue that they have failed to take all reasonable steps as well.
So, there is a duty, and if whoever is responsible for the chair has breached this duty, you may be able to make a successful claim for personal injury compensation.
How does a claim work?
We should be able to help you out on a No Win, No Fee basis. On top of that, we offer 100% compensation agreements to our clients for public liability cases, so you keep all of your payout if we win the claim. Most other lawyers won’t do this because of legal changes from April 2013.
In most cases we submit an electronic claim notification form to the other side or their insurers and ask that they either admit or deny liability within 40 working days from submission. This is normally the maximum amount of time they have to investigate a claim.
If they admit liability we will send you to see an expert to create a report for us that allows us to value your claim. Once we have all your evidence we can settle the claim as soon as possible.
For help and advice, call now on 0800 634 75 75.