Whiplash – ignore the rumours that the press love to spread, which is largely fuelled by the insurance industry who don’t want you to make a whiplash claim for a road traffic accident.
Why don’’t they want you to claim? Simple – it helps them to make even higher profits when people don’t pursue a whiplash claim when they are perfectly entitled to do so.
Insurance is there to cover you, which is why Ms W approached our expert road accident team here at The Injury Lawyers for help with her claim.
Whiplash is extremely difficult to predict when it comes to how long a person will end up suffering for. It can affect different people in different ways. You can have two people in the exact same accident and one may suffer twice as badly as the other.
MYTH BUSTER: whiplash can be recognised and diagnosed by medical experts. The experts we use are privately instructed and their duty is to the court because they are entirely independent. If they don’t feel the injuries were caused by the accident, they will say so in their report.
Their duty is to the court; not to the victim, us, or the insurers. They sign a statement of truth verifying the report and confirm that they’re prepared to stand up in a court of law and give evidence if they ever need to.
So any nonsense about cheap doctors or unqualified professionals producing reports is just another example of a media-fuelled frenzy to fill peoples heads with doubt about claims because the insurers want to save their already healthy pockets! Whilst insurers may use rubbish experts who are more bias to them, we always ask for the best.
Ms W instructed our services as an expert independent personal injury law firm. We didn’t pay a referral fee to an insurer or a claims management company like many law firms used to do before they were banned. We didn’t squander our budget on middlemen to buy the case. Ms W came to us directly and she benefited form our deducted service where our budget for our legal fees was spent on fighting for the best payout possible for her.
We acquired a supportive medical report and submitted the final claim settlement pack to the insurers. Because we have to make the first offer, we do have to go in as high as we reasonably can. We received a fair counter offer which we advised Ms W to accept, and she rightly followed our advice.
The rough average for a minor whiplash payout, which is what most people will fall in to when it comes to legal categories for whiplash, is around £2,500. The true value of the claim though is all dependent on the medical evidence and the extent and severity of the pain and suffering, as well as any losses and expenses.
Had Ms W been approached to settle directly with the insurers, which is a common occurrence, she will have likely settled the claim for around £1,000 – the ‘standard grand’ is what most insurers try and settle claims for when dealing directly. They’ll often start at around the £500 or £750 mark and then, with a little obvious negotiation with you, move up to around the £1k mark.
Whilst we can never accurately predict what may have happened, the award is a good example that proves the statistic where people can get up to four times more with a solicitor by claiming the right way and not accepting those kinds of offers.
In the case of Ms W she got five times more and twice then the average payout. She also benefited from private physiotherapy, the costs of which were charged to the other side as part of the case.
When you claim the proper way, you can settle your claim for its true amount.
