The Injury Lawyers still offer 100% for tripping claims!
If you have had a tripping accident, whether it’s a trip in a shop, at work, or out in the high street on a pothole or raised paving slab, we should be able to offer you a 100% compensation agreement.
Tripping claims at the best of times can be very hard to win – so this, combined with some rather ruthless legal reforms the government imposed in April 2013, has led to most lawyers now taking up to 25% from their client’s payout.
But read on to find out how we can still offer 100% compensation agreements!
Why are tripping claims hard to win?
In public places, it comes down to what reasonable steps a shop, or supermarket, or wherever your accident happened, had taken to prevent a tripping hazard from occurring. If you trip because something has fallen on the ground, or perhaps been knocked off by a customer from a shelf, these can be hard to win. In law, a reasonable step that could be used as a viable defence could be having a system of inspection and maintenance to look out for and clear such hazards.
So if you tripped, but the place where you tripped has a good system of inspection and whatever caused your trip had fallen in between inspection intervals, they can defend the claim.
Making a claim against a local highway authority for a pothole can be even harder – whilst we’d expect multiple inspections in shops or other premises to spot tripping hazards throughout the day, councils inspect roads for defects at intervals of up to 12 months in some areas! If the pothole or defect formed in between their inspections, they can use a special defence they are legally allowed to use which gives them a pretty solid way of stopping you making a claim.
So because they’re hard to win, a lawyer may charge me?
Well, first and foremost, law firms are now taking up to 25% from their clients because the government stopped us recovering a Success Fee from the opponent if we win the claim. This Success Fee is a fee designed to help offset the cost of cases we take on and lose – because in many cases, we simply do not know if you have a claim or not unless we spend money on pursuing it for you. Naturally, most people are put off at the idea of being at risk of paying fees if a claim loses – so the Success Fee is designed to help fund No Win, No Fee claims as part of Access to Justice rules.
Put it this way – how do we know if the other side has a good system of inspection or not unless we actually spend money and trying to sue them?
Now we can’t recover the Success Fee from the other side, lawyers are allowed to recover it from you – but it’s capped to a maximum of 25% from your payout.
Traditionally, the Success Fee would be higher depending on the risk of the case. Because tripping claims are generally hard to win, the Success Fee would often be set very high so for a lawyer to be prepared to take your case on a No Win, No Fee basis; i.e. where there is a risk to the law firm of not being paid but no risk to you of having to pay legal fees.
So the combination of the changes and the risk of the case has shown so far that most lawyers are taking the full 25% for tripping claims if the case wins.
So how do we offer 100%?
We can offer 100% compensation agreements because we agree to waive the Success Fee charge. We can still recover legal fees from the other side – we just can’t recover the Success Fee anymore. But we take on and win a higher volume of claims than many other firms, and we specialise and only represent victims for personal injury claims. This combination allows us to be efficient in an era where our legal fees are reduced, so we agree to waive the Success Fee and take the hit ourselves so you don’t have to.
We still offer a No Win, No Fee as well.
So I really CAN get 100% Compensation with The Injury Lawyers?
Yes – it’s no trick, and we’re not offsetting the Success Fee with other charges or anything like that. So long as you comply with the terms of our agreement, we recover what fees we are allowed to from the other side, and you keep 100% of your payout. It’s as simple as that.
