Stairs, for fairly obvious reasons, are a common cause for accidents and potentially serious injuries if you fall down quite a considerable height. Navigating stairs and steps is made much safer with the use of handrails and banisters to hold on to in the event we lose our footing. I suffer from a condition called foot drop which means I can be fairly unstable when walking, so I’d be in a lot of hot water if there are no handrails.
But back to the question at hand here – what if you trip or lose your footing and you’re injured specifically because there is no handrail or banister to grab hold of? What if you fall down a full flight of stairs because you were not able to grab hold of anything to save yourself from falling?
The Law In General
In most places you are a lawful visitor to, there is a duty on the owner of a premises to take all reasonable steps to prevent a person from being injured. The same can be said for public places outdoors as well.
In the workplace, there are regulations that put a duty on your employer to ensure that all traffic routes can be negotiated in a safe manner, and make sure that provisions are in place to prevent a person from falling. So in this kind of scenario, there are more specific regulations that impose the duty on your employer to take reasonable steps to prevent an injury.
So combining the above, there is a duty there, and you could argue that one way to uphold such a duty is to have a handrail or banister that allows a person to hold on to it when walking up and down stairs or steps. If there is nothing to hold on to and you fall, it would certainly be worth us investigating a claim for you on a No Win, No Fee basis.
What does a No Win, No Fee claim mean for me?
If we accept your claim and agree to fund the case on a No Win, No Fee basis, it does exactly what it says on the tin – if the claim doesn’t win, we don’t charge you for the legal fees we have incurred for the claim. We therefore only offer this if we think we have a reasonable chance of winning your claim.
The above only applies to us though – I can’t speak for other firms who may work in different ways or may still charge you on their own No Win, No Fee agreement. You do need to be careful when considering who to instruct.
And what if I win my claim?
If you win the claim, we are entitled to receive legal fees from the other side. However, due to legal fee reforms last year, the amount of fees and what we can recover has been reduced. The result is that most other law firms will now want to take 25% from your compensation payout.
But we can still offer our clients a 100% compensation agreement because we agree to waive the charge to you that we cannot get form the other side and simply accept the lower fees. We can do this because we take on and win a high volume of claims so the lower fees work just fine for us – amongst other reasons as well. Read up on our 100% Compensation pledge here.
