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You’re walking along and your foot suddenly goes through the floor – stopping you in your tracks and causing an injury – what can you do about it?

Well you may have a claim for personal injury compensation if this has happened to you. We would defiantly be able to look in to a claim on a No Win, No Fee basis; no one expects their foot to just go through a floor.

Injuries caused can be widespread – whether you twist your knee or ankle because your still moving forward when your foot falls through, or whether your foot is badly bruised and grazed from the friction of falling in, this kind of thing should never happen. If it happens in a public place or a place of work, there may be a claim against those is in control of the premises / the employer.

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The Occupiers Liability Act is an important piece of health and safety legislation that puts a duty on those who are in control of a premises to take all reasonable steps to avoid visitors being injured. So keeping the place maintained is an important thing to do – allowing a place to fall in to disrepair and become a hazard would leave the owners of such a place liable to compensate any injured victims.

Some examples of slips and trips caused like this could be:

• From a piece of concrete or wall or roof coming off and causing a trip of slip hazard due to poor maintenance.
• Slip on a broken piece or section of fallen off tiling – these specifically can be very slippery.
• Injury caused by a piece of defective chair or table or other fixture that has broken off through ill repair.

So what happens if you are the victim of such an accident? Can you make a claim for personal injury compensation?

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If you are injured due to a leak in a roof, what are you rights when it comes to making a claim for personal injury compensation?

When it comes to claiming for this, there are typically three main scenarios – a leaky roof at work, in a public place like a shop or restaurant, or in your own rented accommodation. The accident is normally caused by someone slipping due to accumulated water on the ground as a result of a leak in the roof.
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Trapping a part of your body in a door is a lot more painful than you would think; sometimes it can even lead to amputations. Unfortunately, it seems that many children tend to suffer from these types of accidents whilst at school and as the doors in schools tend to be fire doors they are incredibly heavy and can cause a serious injury.

The first thing to point out, with these types of claims, is that they’re not easy to win unfortunately. It is only in specific circumstances where we may be able to assist clients in these type of claims on a No Win No Fee basis. When making a claim for personal injury there has to be certain prerequisites these are:
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As part of a compensation claim we can attempt to recover for any loss of earnings caused by the accident or injuries. This means that if you sustained injury in an accident and as a result you were not able to work and you lost earnings, we can attempt to recover this loss. This would be in addition to any general damages (compensation for your injury). A loss of earnings claim would have to be proved.

To prove a loss of earnings claim we will normally request copies of wage slips and possibly bank statements. We would have to show that a loss actually occurred in order to recover a loss of earnings. We can only recover the actual loss though –  for example if you were off work for 4 weeks and you were paid in full for 2 weeks and then paid half pay for the subsequent two weeks – you lost half of your pay for 2 weeks. If you have a set wage or salary then it is fairly straightforward to calculate your actual loss. If your wage fluctuates up and down each week or month then we would have to calculate your average weekly or monthly wage. We would calculate this using your pre-accident wage slips. These can then be compared to your post-accident wage slips to identify the difference (i.e. the lost earnings).
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When we are out and about in the street, at shopping centres, at the park etc, we are generally on property owned by others. The owner could be the council or local authority, equally a pavement in front of a shop may be owned by the shop itself. As a firm of Solicitors we can ascertain who owns a piece of land. This is often straight forward as we can submit a search with the land registry. It can become quite technical trying to figure out boundary lines in the real world.

However in the most part a land registry search will inform us who owns the land in question. We can then submit a claim to the correct party or local authority. The owner of the land in question (the street, the shopping centre, the car park etc) is responsible for making sure that the land is reasonably safe and free from defects. The owner is responsible for maintaining their land. If you sustain injury because of a defect on someone else’s property or land, then you have a right to claim compensation. This comes under the term “occupier’s liability” if the land is privately owned, or the “Highways Act” if it’s public / Council land.
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Chest injuries can actually be a lot more painful than most people think. If you overstretch the muscles in the chest, it can actually leave you in a considerable amount of agony, restrict your movement, and may even result in time off work. You can normally tell if a chest injury is soft tissue related because it hurts to move or breathe – sometimes even shallow breathing may be painful. But before I go on, if you need advice about chest pain, speak to the NHS immediately because chest pains can be a whole host of serious problems.

Chest injuries are common in slips and trips if the muscles are overstretched as you fall, and they are also common in road accidents. A lot of people get soft tissue injuries on the chest due to seatbelts. This is of course much better than being thrown through a window of course.

Chest injuries that are muscular can also take a long time to subside as well. So you could face a number of weeks or even months in pain. I find that its best to keep moving as this can help the pain symptoms. But always consult a doctor!
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Forklift trucks are widely used in a lot of industries. Given how common they are, accidents at work involving forklift trucks are fairly common. So if you are at work and you have been injured in a forklift truck accident, are you entitled to make a claim for personal injury compensation? Here’s some advice:

Can You Claim?

Whether you can claim or not is down to the individual circumstances of your accident. Common examples where you may have a claim could be:
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The recent PIP scandal has brought these types of claims to the forefront, although the legislation (The Sale and Supply of Goods and Services Act) is often associated more with trying to return goods to a store/seller. However, the Act can be important in personal injury claims, specifically where the provision of a service or good has breached the terms of the Act and have led to personal injury.

The Act states that goods and services should be of a satisfactory quality and fit for purpose and is something that may ring bells with a lot of us who have ever bought something from a store for it to break 2 days later. It gives consumers protection that the goods that they are purchasing do what they should and perform to a satisfactory level.  The PIP breast scandal brought this to the forefront as it has been established by a report led by Sir Bruce Keogh that the implants were not fit for purpose, nor of satisfactory quality, due to the grade of silicon that was used in them and the substandard skin of the implants.
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According to official Judicial Council Guidelines that are used to assess claims, examples of severe ankle injuries include:

• Transmalleolar fractures which often come with severe soft tissue injuries in the surrounding area as well.
• Bilateral ankle fractures which can lead to degeneration of the joints.
• Injuries that require an extensive periods of treatment and rehabilitation, with operations involving pins and plates being inserted.
• Any injury causing a form of residual ankle instability or disability.
• Any injury that results in significant scarring or has any affect on your employment or quality of life – perhaps due to a requirement to wear special footwear.

These sorts of injuries could result in below-knee amputations or the event of a future injury, or arthrodesis, which is an artificial joint inserted in to the foot, being required. Or, as already mentioned above, the requirement to use a splint or some kind of orthotic device or specialist footwear to help you walk properly.
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