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Personally, I can’t tolerate people who drink and drive. There is a very good reason why drinking and driving is illegal – intoxicating substances impair our judgement, and being behind the wheel whilst drunk is like a child running round with a knife. We see it all too often in the news when a person is badly hurt or killed because a driver loses control of their vehicle and causes an incident.

So what happens if you are the unfortunate victim of a drunk driver who has not only caused you a loss by mixing alcohol with driving, but also happens to have no insurance? It’s a lot more common than you might think. This dangerous combination though does not stop you making a claim for personal injury compensation.
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We take on a lot of personal injury compensation claims due to manhole covers being missing or defective. You can end up with some fairly serious injuries from falling due to a manhole cover. But what about manhole covers that cause an accident in the road whilst you are driving?

Generally speaking, the same rules apply. There is a duty on whoever is responsible for the manhole to ensure it is safe. It will commonly either fall as part of the responsibility of the local Highways Agency or of a utilities company.

If you hit an open manhole when driving, you can easily end up injured. The sheer force of the wheel dropping in and being forced back out of the open hole is likely to cause a jolt significant enough to leave you with a whiplash injury. At the same time, our natural instinct is to brake hard when something sudden like this happens, and that might not help. You could also face significant vehicle damages – the bumper could be ripped off, suspension shot, wheel and tyre damage, or even serious underside damage if the undercarriage bottoms out.
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When it comes to making your personal injury compensation claim, we know that you want the maximum compensation, the toughest lawyer to fight your case, and a great service. This can really only be offered by an Accident Injury Specialist – and we know where you can find one!

You might call us bias for plugging ourselves here, but let me give you a few reasons why you should make your personal injury compensation claim with our expert team here at The Injury Lawyers:

Specialist Lawyers

There is a reason why we are called The Injury Lawyers – we only represent victims of personal injury compensation claims, and we don’t deal with any other types of law. All our staff are trained to specifically help victims for compensation claims, and we have a bespoke way of working that is suited to making sure our clients get the maximum compensation in the quickest time possible. The lawyer working on your file will be a specialist injury lawyer with a wealth of experience behind them.
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A head on collision is normally pretty serious. The force of the impact can be high enough to result in fatalities. If you’re lucky enough to survive, the injuries can be fairly severe. So what about liability when it comes to who is at fault for these accidents?

On occasions, proving exactly who is at fault for a head on collision can be very difficult. Deductive logic says that someone must have been on the wrong side of the road if it was head on accident on a straight road. If there are witnesses or CCTV, we can use this as evidence to prove who is at fault.

If it’s one word against another, it will likely be more difficult to prove. We could instruct an expert engineer / mechanic to assess the vehicle damage and perhaps from their findings be able to work out who was at fault. The police need to be in attendance as this may help if they need to investigate the incident.
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As always, it really depends on the type of accident you’ve had. But I will try and help out with some general guidance as to what happens next once the Defendant has accepted liability for your personal injury compensation claim.

Accepting liability is essentially the Defendant agreeing that they owe you compensation for what has happened. They accept there’s been a breach of duty on their part.

When making a claim for compensation there are two hurdles to cross that make for a winning claim – liability and causation. So liability is that first part – proving someone is at fault – causation means proving that the fault has caused a loss to you.
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I’m no medical expert, but I’m well aware that eyes are pretty delicate. Given the advances of modern day technology, surgeons have developed ways of using lasers to correct common eye problems that reduce the need to wear glasses. Laser eye surgery is a readily available and common procedure nowadays. But what happens when things go wrong? I mean, we’re talking about your eyes here.

So what are the common associated risks with eye surgery? Let’s start with looking at common laser eye surgery.

Laser Eye Surgery

When it comes to laser eye surgery, the NHS says that complications occur in less than 5% of patients. Two seemingly inherent risks are as follows:

• Dry eyes in the months following surgery – which may require an artificial tear supplement (apparently there is such a thing!)
• Glare or halo effects at night – particularly when driving.

But moving on now to the worst of the worst – what if treatment causes a loss of vision, whether partial or total? The NHS does say that too much thinning of the eye wall can lead to the shape of the eye being unstable. So there are significant risks that your vision could be affected.
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Cutting ourselves is easy to do. You graze past anything with a bit of an edge and our skin is vulnerable to being cut. But can you make a claim for personal injury compensation if you are cut by a sharp object? Can you even claim for just a cut or scarring? Here’s some advice.

Firstly, you can make a personal injury compensation claim for a cut – or laceration as we call it (the posh term!). You do not have to have broken anything to make a claim. Superficial scarring is a claimable injury, and it’s normally based on the severity and longevity of the scarring. You may not be in pain, but the fact you have a scar on you is claimable. If you have a facial scar, this is obviously taken in to account way more.

Lacerations can of course be much more serious if they are deeper and hit a tendon or nerve.  The damage that can be done if a tendon is torn or severed is significant, and can affect mobility in the affected area. Inuring tendons in the hand and arm could lead to a permanent loss of mobility in the hand or fingers, and this will of course be taken in to account for a claim.
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There are a set of, what we Injury Lawyers call, “common road accidents” and drivers pulling out from a parked position on the side of the road in to your passing vehicle is right up there with the classics. People simply forget the most basic of driving tuition rules – mirror, signal, and manoeuvre.

It’s a lot more common for the victims to be cyclists or motorcyclists. Its far easier to spot a vehicle of the size of a car or bigger, but many will fail to spot much smaller bikers, or may check their mirrors and pull out too quickly without noting the biker in their blind spot. A driver should always take caution when moving off from a parked position; even if the road looks clear.

So who is at fault in this kind of scenario? To us, it seems fairly obvious as we have years and years of experience in dealing with road accident claims. But the law is fairly simple – if you are correctly proceeding past a parked car on the side of the road and they pull out and hit you, they should be 100% to blame. So if this has happened to you, we can help you out with a claim for compensation.
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Cherry pickers can be fairly dangerous if something goes wrong. Aside from the obvious working at height, there are particular hazards if your employer fails to properly equip and prepare you for using the cherry picker. So let’s look at a few examples.

One of the most common types of accidents is people crashing them. Although they can be fairly slow, it only takes one clip of something to rock the platform and you could easily fall over or knock yourself on something. So starting with this, could you make a claim for a cherry picker crash?

If the controls were in the hands of a colleague, you should have a strong case. We can allege that your employer is vicariously liable in the event a colleague’s negligence causes you injury. That’s the general rule of vicarious liability. If you are at the helm, then it could come down to training. Have you ever had training in using the picker? Did you crash it because you were unsure of the controls? In this kind of situation, the failure to train could be a path to making a compensation claim. Safety equipment, like a helmet, could be used to prevent a head injury from a fall. So we could take that in to account as well.
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We’ve been covering this a lot lately – simply down to the fact that most other law firms are now charging clients up to 25% of their compensation and asking for payment of an insurance fee. Why? Because our genius government decided that years and years of access to fair justice should be quashed in favour of insurance companies saving money. Whether this is down to how much money a lot of politicians seem to have in the insurance industry is a question in itself; but I digress.

April 1^st 2013 saw the biggest shakeup in the personal injury claiming world ever. For the first time in a long time, the innocent victims of negligence are now expected to pay to be compensated. Whilst lawyers can still recover most of their legal fees from the other side, we can now no longer recover a Success Fee and an After The Event Insurance fee.

The Success Fee is part of our fees that reflects the risk of a case. Some are riskier than others, and we can’t win them all – so we do lose money when we cannot continue a case on a No Win, No Fee basis. This Success Fee now cannot be recovered from the other side, and this is where the 25% has come in. The reason why it’s commonly 25% is because that is the maximum a lawyer can charge a client for the success Fee.
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