Occupiers Liability Supermarket Slips and Trips

Personal injury claims against supermarkets are common, with customers commonly slipping or tripping in the supermarket aisles. Any owner of a supermarket owes a duty of care to visitors of their store under the Occupiers Liability Act 1957. When that duty is breached, a personal injury is sustained due to the supermarkets negligence.

Under the 1957 Act, ‘An occupier of premises owes the same duty, “the common duty of care”, to all his visitors, except in so far as he is free to and does extend, restrict, modify or exclude his duty to any visitor or visitors by agreement or otherwise‘.

Visitors are to include customers, store staff, suppliers and delivery drivers.  An occupier is to be seen as the individual in general control over the premises or in this instance supermarket in question.
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Risk of Manual Handling Injuries at Work

Manual Handling is one of the most common causes of injury in the workplace. Manual Handling generally includes; lifting, lowering, pushing, pulling or carrying, and most employees carry out some sort of manual handling within their working day.

Common types of injury caused by manual handling are:

• Back pain
• Sprains and strains to lower back and shoulders
• Damages to muscles and tendons

The Manual Handling Operations Regulations were introduced in 1992 in order to keep employees safe in the workplace and to reduce the number of employees injured at work.

The Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 set out that employer should ‘so far as is reasonably practicable, avoid the need for his employees to undertake any manual handling operations at work which involve a risk of injury‘ and ‘shall make a suitable and sufficient assessment of all such operations which cannot be avoided‘ plus ‘shall take appropriate steps to reduce the risk of injury during those operations to the lowest level reasonably practicable‘.
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Traffic Light Accident Fault Injury Lawyers Advice

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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Car Park Accidents – Injury Lawyers Advice

Accidents in car parks are fairly common. With so many cars and people rushing about, accidents will happen. So if you have had an accident in a car park, can you make a claim for compensation?

If the accident was not your fault, we should be able to help you out with a claim. You should discuss the circumstances with us and we will confirm if we think we can make a successful claim for you. To help you in the meantime, here are some common car park accident circumstances where you should be able to make a claim for compensation.
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Chemical Spill Claims

Chemicals can be inherently dangerous to all of us. One of the world’s most famous industrial disasters occurred in Bhopal, India in 1984. In this disaster toxic gas leaked from a pesticide plant and the actual number of resulting deaths is disputed.

Government figures state that around 3,700 people died as a result of the incident, although some estimates claim that as many as 8,000 people have died since as a result of the toxic gas. This alone is an example of just how dangerous chemicals can be.

A chemical accident refers to an event resulting in the release of a substance or substances that are harmful to our health and or to the environment. Such events include explosions, leakages or the release of toxic materials that can cause illness, injury and death.
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How Much Cash Can I Get?

Very common question we get here at The Injury Lawyers; but the answer is not so easy to give you. I will try and be brief with this blog so you can get an insight in to how we find out what your claim is worth, and why I can’t tell you now!

There is only one foolproof way to value a claim for personal injury compensation – by seeing a qualified medico-legal expert who produces a report, and by having an expert personal injury solicitor to assess the report and value the claim.

This is the way to truly find out how much the claim is worth.
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How Do You Value a Personal Injury claim?

Often at the outset of a claim people will want to know how much compensation they are likely to receive. Solicitors can sometimes give very basic and straightforward estimates but at the outset you should be aware that it is impossible to value a claim with any accuracy.

Any value given is simply an estimate which cannot be relied upon. If you understand how claims are valued then you will realise why Solicitors cannot give accurate valuations at the outset.

So how are personal injury claims valued?
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Why is My Insurance Claim Taking so Long?

For many reasons I imagine – but all generally revolving around one thing – legal expenses insurance (hereafter referred to as LEI)! For actual law firms like us, there is nothing more disheartening than when clients are taken in by this system and ultimately potentially deceived. LEI is a straight forward system but benefits usually only two groups of people – the insurers and solicitors!

Legal expenses insurance involves your insurers (like your car insurers) SELLING your details across to a solicitor who will then use a percentage of their costs to pay for your details in the first place. For example: a solicitor may pay your insurers £1,000.00 for your details which is then taken away from the amount of funds they have to run your case. The next question of course though is how does this make your claim go slower?

Less funds =  less phone calls, letters and less work being done on the case. Importantly – less fighting for the highest payout and therefore LESS compensation for you!
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Accident at Work Claims – What to Expect on the Initial Call

Starting any claim can be a daunting prospect for many people; but, there always seems to be more reluctance and fear surrounding accidents at work as many worry it will affect either their current employment or their employment in the future. Hopefully this blog will put some minds at ease. If you have been injured through no fault of your own in the workplace, your injuries may be extremely debilitating and lead to losses that you just can’t afford.

Making a claim may well be the only option to take…

Pursing an accident at work claim should NOT affect your employment status as the law does protect you for making a claim. In most cases, if the company is quite large, employers may encourage people to do get a lawyer and make a claim. This is because all employers are required to take out insurance to cover just this type of thing, and many big companies will have been sued several times over. The majority of the time it is not that person you work with everyday that will be pursued, as most places just pass the letter of claim across to their insurers and it is them that deals with the entire process.
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U-Turn Overtaking Compensation Claims

Overtaking a vehicle can be pretty daunting even when you follow the Highway Code; however the number of accidents involving overtaking vehicles is significant.

The most common type of accident occurs when a vehicle is overtaking another and the vehicle being overtook attempts to perform a u-turn or make a right turn. Unfortunately, liability for these types of accidents are not always straight forward and each case is assessed on its individual circumstances. Most of the time it will need to be determined as to whether each party has made their intentions known to other road users and positioned their vehicles correctly.

It is very useful to obtain the details of any witnesses in any accident but in these types of circumstances, it can be an essential piece of evidence with regards to supporting allegations as to what signals were used or not used. Otherwise, it is often your word against the other party’s.
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