Archives

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:
Read More

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.
Read More

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.
Read More

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!
Read More

‘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.
Read More

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.
Read More

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.
Read More

The amount of times I have received calls from clients saying “I don’t want to accept the first or second offer, I have been told to always accept the third” is ridiculous and quite honestly I am boggled as to where this “pearl of wisdom” has come from – because quite frankly it is utter rubbish!

Your whiplash claim will be valued based on medical evidence. An independent medical expert will be instructed in order to review you and provide a report and opinion on how long you are likely to be suffering with your injuries. This is the main aspect of valuing your injury.

The value of your injury will be placed in a bracket. For example: £1500 – £1750. This means that your claim is worth £1500 at the minimum and £1750 aat the maximum, according to the brackets.
Read More

Supermarkets can be dangerous places – so it would seem by the number of personal injury claims brought as a result of accidents in supermarkets. Not wanting to put people off going to the supermarket, accidents can happen anywhere at any place or time – not just in supermarkets.

Due to the number of people in a supermarkets and the number of potential hazards, accidents are bound to happen on occasion. So what type of accidents can happen in a supermarket?

The most obvious type of accident in a supermarket is when people slip on something that has been left on the floor. Perhaps something has been spilt on the floor such as a liquid drink or some other product which causes a slipping hazard for unsuspecting shoppers. Obviously as soon as a spill occurs the store should bring people’s attention to the hazard, by erecting a wet floor sign for example. However if no wet floor sign is erected then it is likely that shoppers are not aware of the hazard and in this scenario it could be difficult for the store to escape liability if they can prove their systems of inspection are up to standards.
Read More

Manual handling is lifting, lowering, filling, emptying or carrying loads. Manual handling covers carrying a person, an animal or an object. It can be said that most manufacturing or distribution works require a certain amount of manual handling. An element of manual handling probably cannot be avoided in some jobs. Some may not want a machine or automated system to carry things for us, as this could be another way of machinery taking over people’s jobs.

The Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 set out the measures which must be taken to reduce the risks associated with manual lifting and carrying while at work. A vast amount of accidents are associated with manual handling, although fatal manual handling accidents are rare. However serious injuries can and do happen in relation to manual handling.

The Regulations mean that employers must, whenever possible, avoid the need for employees to undertake manual handling operations. Obviously this is not possible in each and every job and if you are required to undertake manual handling duties then your employer should undertake risk assessments. Risk assessments involve a review of the whole process, for example could the work be done differently, what measures could be taken.
Read More