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When making a claim for compensation, there are 2 aspects which normally make up your compensation award. These are General Damages which is for your pain, suffering and loss of amenity, and Special Damages.

Special damages is any quantifiable expense that you have incurred because of the accident or injuries. The purpose is to address any economic loss and to give you back return your financial position to that which would have been had the injury not occurred.

Not many people keep receipts for every purchase (myself included) but without documented evidence, the Defendant or their representatives are unlikely to reimburse you for the loss.

What can you include as a Special Damage?
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If you have lost earnings due to an accident through no fault of our own, you can include a claim for loss of earnings as part of the compensation claim you’re making. The claim itself comes in to two parts commonly: General Damages and Special Damages. The latter is what lost earnings is covered under.

The general principle in law is that anything you have reasonably lost or reasonably paid out for as a result of an accident or injury is something you should be able to clam back for as part of a case. As long, the reason for the loss, is attributable to the accident or the injuries, and as long as it’s reasonable, there shouldn’t be any reason why we can’t claim it back.

What’s reasonable? Good question…

It’s common to send you to a medical expert as part of the claim, as they will produce a report that is used to help us value your claim on the injury side of things. The expert should also comment on the reasonableness of any time off work that has resulted in the lost earnings. As an example – if you’re staying off work because you can’t lift anything at work due to a bad back injury you are suffering from  and you work in a warehouse lifting heavy  boxes all day, I’d say that’s reasonable, and I’d like to think any right minded GP or medical expert would agree.
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The only way to value a claim for personal injury compensation is by getting examined by an appropriate expert who then produces a medico-legal report, that is in turn used by a fully qualified personal injury lawyer who will review the evidence and value the claim based on the correct legal guidelines.

On top of that, if you have suffered any loss of earnings, or medical expenses, travel expenses, care and assistance from friends and family etc, these can be added in as well.
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When your claim is settled, and you know your cheque is on the way, stay patient! We know you want the money as quickly as possible, and you probably already have your eye on a few things you want to buy once the cheque has cleared, but there are still processes involved.

When the claim is settled, we will normally request the cheque within 14 – 21 days of the acceptance to pay the agreed amount. However, there are a number of things to consider:
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Want to know how much your claim is worth?

Here is how you find out:

1. Instruct us to deal with the claim.
2. Allow us to get a medico-legal report for you.
3. Let us value the claim.

It’s a simple process. Without medical evidence though, it is nigh impossible to accurately value a claim for personal injury compensation. Why? Because we as specialist injury lawyers can only assess the severity and nature of your injuries when a suitably qualified medical expert (your own GP doesn’t count) has done a thorough and comprehensive medico-legal report.

Without this evidence, we simply cannot value a claim. So if you’re looking for a second opinion because you already have a law firm dealing with the case, we’re not really able to help.  If you want to know how much the claim is worth before making a claim, you’re better off instructing us and letting us do things right to make sure we can actually give you a proper assessment! Although if you ring us today we can tell you whether the claim is worth at least £1,000, which in our eyes certainly makes it worth pursuing.
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As the weather gets colder (or at least it should be getting colder!) we see an increase in accidents. Slipping on snow and ice, wet floors from people treading ice and water in to places, car accidents from skidding; it can be somewhat of a nightmare. We get a lot of enquiries from people wanting to make a claim, but it’s not so easy when the weather is a factor.

Firstly, slipping on snow or ice whilst out in the street is a difficult claim to win. You would have to prove that the council has been negligent in the duty of care they have for you. Whilst they often have a duty to grit, it’s not likely they will grit pavements (as an example) unless it is absolutely necessary. The local authorities are restricted in their budgets as it is, and the focus is normally on roads. However, whether they grit or not is entirely dependent on what their own specific policy says.

If you skid in your car due to black ice, you still normally don’t have a great chance of succeeding with the case. Again, it could depend on whether the council were able to grit in the day it happened, or even if there was enough grit to go around! The gist is that blaming the council is easier said than done.
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Accepting pre medical offers is NOT advisable – and this advice is coming from a firm of specialist personal injury lawyers. The reason for this is that the valuation of your claim cannot be determined without proper medical evidence. You need to attend an appointment and have a suitable expert produce a Medico-legal report; so nipping to see your own GP doesn’t count! A pre medical offer is just that – an offer before medical evidence is obtained. Hence: pre medical.

Put it this way – would you buy a car without having a test drive or even knowing what it looks like? Would you buy a house without knowing where it is, or the condition of the premises? Would you as a football manager buy a striker without any background knowledge of whether they can even manage to put the ball in the net? Would you buy a Christmas tree without knowing what it looks like? I could go on forever…

The relevance of this is – would you accept money for an injury claim when you don’t know how much is it actually worth? Well, if the answer to all the questions in the paragraph above is no, the answer to this question should also be no!
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‘Tis the season to be jolly‘! With less than 3 weeks until Christmas, the decs are up and the presents are (probably) bought and we are all feeling a little cash strapped for the rest of the festive season. This is the perfect opportunity for insurance companies to save themselves a great deal of money; at your expense!

Here at The Injury Lawyers, we call it Pre Medical Offer Season. Basically, as the insurers know we are all in need of a little extra cash over the festive period, they go mad for making pre medical offers to people in the hope to settle the claim for a potentially low sum by feeding on the need people have for more money during the Christmas period. They do it when you have a lawyer, or even without.

You will be offered something like £1,000 to settle the claim now. They’ll promise you a cheque within days, and hopefully it can clear before it’s too late to hit the shops for Christmas or the January sales. It’s extremely tempting to anyone. The trade off though is that you may be under settling your claim. The only way we can properly value your claim for compensation is with proper solid medical evidence. If you don’t have medical evidence, no one can properly value your claim. A pre medical offer is an offer to settle the claim in full and final in the absence of medical evidence. So it’s a literal shot in the dark so to speak.
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Compensation is based upon the severity of your injuries and how long the injuries will affect your everyday life. As such, there is not really such a thing as a “standard” payout for any particular injury as everyone can be affected differently.

In law the defendant has to take the claimant as they find them – for example if your injury is an exacerbation of an existing injury this doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to claim as, of-course, if it wasn’t for the injury, your condition would not have been aggravated!

So how is a payout assessed? Well, put simply a payout is always assessed on the particular facts of each individual case. There is no such thing as one payout for this injury and another for something else – each case will have its own individual payout.
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Walking round the town centre on a Friday or Saturday night, you can see why drunken pedestrians get involved in accidents. There is often no regard for the vehicles on the road and a lot of the time the pedestrians are just stepping out into the roads.

If a drunken pedestrian is involved in an accident, although the courts normally favour pedestrians in road traffic accidents, it is not likely that a claim for negligence against the driver will be successful.

There is a recent case in law that highlights this; Stewart v Glaze 2009. In this case Mr Stewart was sitting at a bus stop with his friend having been out drinking. Mr Stewart had consumed around 5-7 pints and was drunk. Mr Glaze was driving on the road towards the bus stop when Mr Stewart ran into the road which resulted in a collision with Mr Glaze’s vehicle. Mr Stewart suffered severe head injuries and was left in a vegetative state. The Judge held that Mr Glaze was not negligent in this case. There was no evidence to suggest that he was not driving carefully and that it was unreasonable to say that Mr Glaze should have seen Mr Stewart at the precise moment he decided to charge into the road. On the facts of this case, there was absolutely no reason to find that Glaze had been negligent.
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