When you are suffering from an injury as a result of an accident, it is common that you will incur some losses. This can include things such as loss of earnings, medical and treatment expenses but also care and assistance whereby your friends and family have to help with everyday tasks that when uninjured can seem pretty mundane.
When claiming for losses however, you do not simply have free reign to claim everything and anything you can think of- your losses have got to be “reasonable”. Although at first this may seem like a legal technicality, it does usually come down to common sense and you can ensure you are staying within the proximity by simply thinking “is this reasonable?” every time you are going to incur a loss. For example: going on a 5* all inclusive spa holiday because you have suffered a neck injury may not be – but going for a few massages to release tension probably is.
Mitigating your losses basically means keeping your losses to a reasonable minimum. For example; in relation to loss of earnings if a medical report states that you are fit to work after 2 weeks and you chose to stay off longer, the extra loss incurred may not be recoverable as you cannot be seen to have helped yourself.
In a personal injury case it is down to the defendant to prove that you could and should have mitigated your losses – if you are seen to have not tried to take steps to do so the law does not look upon this kindly, and therefore in the end you can end up losing money and being unnecessarily disappointed.
Of course, in the majority of cases a person can incur a lot of losses especially when their injury is serious and mitigating your losses should not be looked upon as a bad thing. By doing this, you can avoid unnecessary arguments and get the compensation you deserve. Here at The Injury Lawyers we will fight to gain you everything back we can, but this does require you to be actively involved in the process and ensure we have all the “ammunition” available to us to get you this optimum amount.
Claiming for compensation is to try and place you back into the position you were prior to your accident and resulting injury and therefore this duty to mitigate is imposed to ensure that claiming is not seen as a way to make a quick buck. Being honest is always the best way to proceed as to not be honest can leave your claim open to criticism and at worst maybe even fraud.
This duty is not there to make claiming more difficult, it is simply there to protect the system from abuse as of course if this happens it could ruin the game for everyone. So if you are struggling to manage your losses following an accident, contact us today. We can take steps to ensure everything runs smoothly and quickly and of course, if you are ever in doubt about whether a loss will not be recoverable you can simply ask. We are open 9am-10pm in the week and 9am-5pm at weekends so if you need us we are here.
