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Together with roundabouts and junctions, traffic light controlled areas are up there with the most common scenes of a road traffic accident. So here are a few examples of classic crashes and a little advice about who may be at fault.

Rear End Shunt

Keep it simple to start with – when traffic slows or is stationary, rear end collisions are fairly common. If the lights change and traffic suddenly slows, it only takes one driver who isn’t concentrating as much as they should to not notice the traffic has slowed or stopped. In the vast majority of cases, the person who collided with the rear of another vehicle is at fault. The excuse that traffic slowed too suddenly isn’t normally a good enough defence!
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Cosmetic surgery is becoming more and more popular as the industry has shifted and now caters for everyone and not just the rich and the famous. Prices seem quite steep from what I’ve seen, but they are far from unaffordable if you want the look of your dreams.

But the big question that many people ask is this – how safe is cosmetic surgery?

Any surgery, particularly invasive surgery, carries numerous potential side effects and risks. Risks of infection are probably the most common ones, and infections alone can lead to all sorts of complications. But inherent risks aside, how safe is it when you put your life and body in the hands of a surgeon for money? How qualified are they to do the procedure?
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Store rooms can be fairly dangerous places if employers fail to follow basic health and safety regulations. The most common types of store room accidents are usually caused by the room being too full or dangerously organised (or not organised at all) which normally causes trips, slips from spillages, and accidents involving working at height with ladders or steps.

Employers have an important general duty to make sure that all areas of the workplace are safe to navigate; so when it comes to a stock room being organised and not overfilled, we can apply The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992. These state that all traffic routes shall be safe to navigate. So if you fall because you can’t properly get round a stockroom as it’s too full, you may have a claim for compensation.

If you trip because stock is on the floor when it shouldn’t be, you may also have a claim. Commonly this comes down to one of two things – either poor organisation on your employers part meaning you could apply the above regulations again, or something called vicarious liability.
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One bit of loose carpet can be a serious issue if someone trips on it or slips because it isn’t gripping the floor. Tripping or slipping can be bad enough if you fall down to the floor fast and hard, but what about carpets on stairs? You take a fall down a flight of stairs and you can end up with serious injuries.

So is there a law or a duty when it comes to loose carpets? It depends on where it happens, but given its likely it will be in a place of work or in a public place, here is the info you need to know:

Loose Carpet at Work

Regulation 12 (2) (a) states:

The floor, or surface of the traffic route, shall have no hole or slope, or be uneven or slippery so as, in each case, to expose any person to a risk to his health or safety.
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Chest injuries can actually be a lot more painful than most people think. If you overstretch the muscles in the chest, it can actually leave you in a considerable amount of agony, restrict your movement, and may even result in time off work. You can normally tell if a chest injury is soft tissue related because it hurts to move or breathe – sometimes even shallow breathing may be painful. But before I go on, if you need advice about chest pain, speak to the NHS immediately because chest pains can be a whole host of serious problems.

Chest injuries are common in slips and trips if the muscles are overstretched as you fall, and they are also common in road accidents. A lot of people get soft tissue injuries on the chest due to seatbelts. This is of course much better than being thrown through a window of course.

Chest injuries that are muscular can also take a long time to subside as well. So you could face a number of weeks or even months in pain. I find that its best to keep moving as this can help the pain symptoms. But always consult a doctor!
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Despite what insurance companies tell people, they are there to save money – not pay out as much as possible. I can say this with a huge degree of confidence because I see it in action everyday here at The Injury Lawyers HQ and I’ve seen some of the absolutely appalling offers insurers try and fob people off with.

If you are dealing with the insurers directly, and you are looking for some guidelines valuations, I will give you a few breakdowns later on in the blog but heed this massive warning – dealing with the insurers is not a clever way to settle your claim. Yes, you may be able to settle it quicker, but it’s highly likely you are in serious danger of under settling the claim. If I had a pound for every time people had settled directly and then come to a lawyer for help because they feel they’ve under settled, I’d be writing blogs about my worldwide travel escapades on the back of a 164ft yacht.

So what is the maximum whiplash compensation you can get? Is there an upper limit? How much is your claim worth? How much is the average whiplash compensation claim worth? This isn’t something that you can easily estimate…
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Since legal reforms came in to place on April 1^st of this year, the whole personal injury legal system has been shaken to the core with most law firms now charging clients up to 25% of their compensation and asking them to pay for an insurance premium after our genius government changed the law so lawyers can no longer recover all fees from the other side.

Before April, we had, in my opinion, a nice and fair system – you make a claim for negligence, and the other side pays for your legal fees because it’s not your fault that you were injured and it’s not your fault you need to make a claim as a result. But our current government, in all of their infinite wisdom, essentially decided that victims should pay. That’s why lawyers can no longer recover a Success Fee, which is a part of our fees that help us to fund the risk of taking cases on on a No Win, No Fee basis, and an After The Event insurance premium which is for insurance to protect you against costs from the other side or from having to pay unrecoverable disbursements.
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As specialist injury lawyers, we deal with all types of compensation claims, and this includes medical negligence cases. Medical negligence cases require a great deal of experience and expertise to pursue and succeed with, as they are inherently difficult to pursue.

But on occasions, we take on a case that is so blatant when it comes to negligence, and with consequences so horrifying, it puts your whole faith in medical professions to question.

From sources at The Independent, an inquest in to the death of a heavily pregnant woman has brought to light that trainee NHS surgeons removed her ovaries instead of her appendix by mistake. Tragically the woman died within weeks of the operation. The NHS only realised 2 days after her re-admittance to hospital that the wrong organ had been removed.
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If you are asked to move heavy furniture at work, it’s probably going to be quite difficult to move by yourself. Normally help is required to do it safely. But what if you are asked to lift heavy furniture all by yourself?

The applicable law is The Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992. Regulation 4 (b) states that each employer shall:

(i) make a suitable and sufficient assessment of all such manual handling operations to be undertaken…

(ii) take appropriate steps to reduce the risk of injury to those employees arising out of their undertaking any such manual handling operations to the lowest level reasonably practicable

This puts a duty on your employer to make sure that any manual handling tasks that are done are safe. So if your employer asks you to move heavy furniture and you are injured as a result, they are either failing to properly assess the task, or ignoring the fact that the task is clearly dangerous in the first place.
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We are somewhat of an expert firm of injury lawyers when it comes to breast surgery. We represent a large proportion of the women claiming compensation for the faulty and dangerous PIP breast implants; a scandal which came to light in late 2011. So here is a little advice about the prospect of making a claim when breast surgery has gone wrong.

First things first, cosmetic compensation claims are not always easy to win. A lot can go wrong with any surgery, particularly surgery as invasive as breast augmentation. When it comes to implants, a foreign body is being put in to your body, and there are always risks associated with this.

So if something has gone wrong, we need to identify the cause and whether the problem has been caused as a result of negligence or an inherent risk.

For example, an infection is a very common inherent risk of most procedures like this. If you suffer from an infection, it can be difficult to claim because it is so common. Nothing much can be done to stop a general infection. So we need to clarify that the problem has been caused as a result of a mistake.
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