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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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To set the scene, I’m going to briefly explain about the legal changes that came in to force on April 1^st 2013. The gist is that for people making a claim after this date, it’s likely that their lawyer will not be able to recover all of their legal fees from the other side. Before April, all reasonable legal fees were recoverable. After April, the government banned the recovery of some of the lawyer’s fees.

The two things that can no longer be recovered are:

1. Success Fee – which is usually a percentage of our fees that helps us to fund no win, no fee claims.
2. After The Event insurance premium – insurance we take out that we can claim adverse costs or unrecoverable disbursements from.

As a result, the vast majority of law firms are now charging clients. The ‘market rate’ appears to be 25% because that’s the maximum the government have allowed a lawyer to charge a client for the unrecoverable success fee, and many law firms are also asking for payment of the insurance premium.
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We take on a lot of compensation claims for people who have tripped and fallen on steps. To be fair, they are pretty dangerous. So when can you make a claim for personal injury compensation as a result of a trip on some steps?

There has to be something wrong with the steps for you to be able to make a claim. There has to be negligence and someone has to be liable. To coin a common phrase, where there is blame, there may be a claim.

So here are a couple of examples where you may be able to make a personal injury compensation claim for tripping on dangerous steps.

Broken Steps

If steps are broken and you trip or fall as a result, whoever is responsible for the maintenance of the steps may be liable to compensate you. Whether they are liable or not could come down to what kind of notice they had about the damage, or whether they have a reasonable system of inspection and maintenance to stop a hazard arising.
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Every time I see one of these claims come in to the office, the first things that runs through my head is how common and classic these types of accidents are. General supermarket slipping accidents are of course common in general, but for some reason, grapes seem to be one of the biggest culprits of supermarket slipping accidents.

Perhaps it’s because they can easily end up falling out of a bag or out of a box, and their size is probably fairly difficult to spot on the floor. But despite its small size, they can be a horrendous slipping hazard when stepped on. You might not have thought it, but as I’ve said, we take on a lot of grape slipping claims.

The injuries can be fairly severe. Aside from the obvious broken bones from landing hard on a supermarket floor, you could easily stretch and rupture ligaments and tendons in areas like your back, ankles, or knees, which in the worst case scenarios can leave you needing surgical intervention. All because of just a grape!
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