Most people are eager to get their compensation claim settled as quickly as they can. It’s nice to have some extra cash, especially in times of financial constraints. So, if you’re making a car accident claim, you’ll be wanting to know how long should it take to settle?
The factors
It often depends on the following primary factors:
- Whether liability is being fully or partially disputed
- Whether you are fully recovered from your injuries or will need ongoing treatment or have a lengthy recovery time
- The seriousness of the injuries
Liability is normally fairly easy to establish, but if the other side are denying fault or fault is potentially gong to be split between more than one party, it’s likely to lengthen the process.
So, putting liability to one side… the biggest thing that normally has an affect is the nature of your injury. The fact is:
“We will always advise you to only settle the claim once you are fully healed or healed as much as you are going to.”
The reason is that we can only be fully certain that our medical evidence is accurate by waiting for the prognosis period to expire.
What this means
When you have the medical report from your appointment, the expert will normally provide a prognosis which is an estimated time of recovery. This could be something like six months from the date of the accident, or perhaps nine months from the date of the appointment.
Sadly, our experts are not gifted with psychic abilities. If they were it’d be great – because if we could see in to the future and know precisely when you’ll be fully recovered, we could settle a claim right away! But the expert can only give their best opinion, and with injuries like whiplash, which is way more complicated than most people think, it’s not an exact science.
As such, you have two options:
- Wait for the prognosis period to expire / wait to fully recover
- Settle based on the evidence
If you wait, it can likely take longer to settle because you need to wait a prescribed period of time before settling. If you don’t wait, you can settle right away but we will likely advise against this because if you do settle and you end up suffering beyond the prognosis period, you cannot just come back and claim for more. You are at risk of under settlement.
It sounds harsh, but there really is no other way of doing this. You either wait and play it safe, or you risk it and potentially lose out on money.
So, whilst we can say that a dead easy claim could be settled in a few short months, the true length is entirely dependent on the nature and the severity of your suffering.