We get stressed about money, reputation, safety, relationships, life changes… Life changes are a journey. And they’re journeys that usually involve stress. By the end, you're a different person. Both elements – change and stress – play their part in the transformation process. Personal injury claims are stressful. In this article, we’ll look at the nature and causes of the various stresses. Then, having considered these ‘problems’, we’ll list out the ‘solutions’ - the reasons why, nevertheless, you should go ahead with a personal injury compensation claim. Getting injured creates its own acute stress at the time. Often, there’s immediate severe pain. Beyond that, you have a loss of independence – with increased dependence on others. And also fears for the future: will you recover to full fitness? Most people seek legal representation for a personal injury compensation claim after the acute phase of the injury is over. Perhaps after you get out of hospital or after you Continue Reading
The most-consumed 2020 articles on the Moray Claims blog
Solicitors have generally managed to keep going through the pandemic and lockdowns in 2020. There have been good reasons to consider consulting a solicitor even though physical face-to-face meetings have been difficult, if not impossible. We’ve produced quite a few articles in 2020 and this one counts down the Top 10 most popular blog posts of the year from Moray Claims. 10. When being even 10 per cent to blame for your accident is too much to accept Contributory negligence can apply where your claim is going to be successful but there’s an argument that the accident was partly your fault too. This would have the result of reducing the compensation payable to you by a percentage. Ten per cent (the minimum level which most courts impose, in practice) may not seem too much of a reduction but this article highlights how your solicitor will often refuse to accept even 10 per cent as reasonable – and argue for nil per cent, i.e. that your claim should succeed in full, 100 per Continue Reading
What actually happens if you enquire about a personal injury claim
If you’re considering contacting us - or any solicitor - about making a personal injury claim, even if you think you might want to get in touch, lots of things can put you off at the last minute. Some doubt or some distraction may get in the way. There are many possible barriers to taking the final step and getting in touch. We want you to get in touch and not be prevented from doing so. Enquiries are free and without obligation to take things further with us. Any work that follows after we take on your personal injury claim is free of charge in most cases anyway. This article tries to provide answers to the questions that might be swirling around in your head. The questions and objections holding you back from phoning us or sending us a free online enquiry. If you’re wondering why you should get in touch with us rather than someone else who provides personal injury compensation claims services… We’re accredited specialist solicitors. We are experienced. Continue Reading
What pricing will apply to our help with your personal injury claim in Moray?
When asked about his nationality, legendary Scottish fiddler, Johnny Cunningham, liked to tell people that he was half Scottish and half Irish. This explained, he said, why half of him wanted to drink all the time and the other half never wanted to pay for it. Everyone prefers a free option if it’s realistic… …and cost is one important aspect of personal injury compensation claims. What is it that personal injury clients want? In many cases they will say that it’s about “justice”. It’s the principle of the thing. In practice, what this boils down to is questions about how much your claim is likely to be worth and how long it is all likely to take to get justice for you. From the solicitor’s point of view, the main question tends to be: “Is there a claim?” - Will we be able to prove someone caused your injury by negligence? And, of course, another important question you’ll have is: “How much is it going to cost me to get help from this solicitor? Cost Continue Reading
When being even 10 per cent to blame for your own injury is too much
“Can I buy or sell a house without a solicitor?” Grigor & Young have newspaper cuttings books back to the 19th century, and that’s how one cutting from the mid-1980s is headlined. The body text continues: “In theory, you can do much of the work yourself. In theory, you can also remove your own appendix – given a sharp knife, a reliable textbook and a bit of practice.” The cover of Grigor & Young's newspaper cuttings book from 1986. Seth Godin picked up on this theme of expertise in a post on his daily blog. He asked: “Okay, how hard can it be? (to be an expert). Actually, it might be very hard. Actually, expertise has value. Actually, just because someone said it on the internet doesn’t mean it’s true. Or useful.” What’s the chance you’d be able to do such conveyancing or (especially) surgery yourself? Limited, you would think. Less than 10%? Less than 1%? And a small chance is what you would expect to have, in general, if you were hoping to Continue Reading
Encouraging child road safety awareness
Nearly two-thirds of parents do not think their children have a good understanding of the dangers or concentrate properly near roads That’s one of the findings of a YouGov survey commissioned by the Association of Personal Injuries for Injury Prevention Week 2020. In the UK-wide study, parents of school-age children were asked to think about how confident they are about their child or children’s road safety awareness. The child road safety survey results are as follows. 12% of parents are very worried about their children’s safety17% of UK parents think their children know the rules but don’t concentrate when near roads36% said they have some understanding of the dangers The remainder said their children have a very good understanding of the dangers – which is great - but we want to address the near 2/3rds of parents who are not so confident. Your biggest helper comes in the form of the Green Cross Code. Arguably, it’s as important for children to learn as Continue Reading
Pocket that phone and help prevent needless injuries on the roads
It does not look the sort of road you would expect to see a pedestrian try to cross. Other than at traffic lights. Or using a bridge or underpass. Viewed through the dashcam of the slow-moving car in queuing traffic, we can see it’s an urban environment. The road has 4 lanes in each direction (we’re in the 3rd lane). A continuous concrete barrier about 4 feet high forms the central reservation. A young woman steps off the pavement to our left and begins crossing from left to right – for her, crossing the first half of the road. She’s on her mobile. She’s holding it up to her right ear. We can see her left hand gesturing as she chats. The field of view is distorted by the wide angle lens of the dashcam – it makes things look further away than they are in fact. As the woman crosses in front of our vehicle, she bows slightly to thank us for making room for her to pass through. The outside lane to our right has been empty throughout the 8 seconds or so since she Continue Reading
Do you know how to tell if a car is about to reverse?
Once we know something, we find it difficult to imagine what it was like not to know it. This is known as the Curse of Knowledge. Here’s an example. In a 1990 experiment, pairs of people had to try to identify 120 well-known songs – e.g. Happy Birthday to You. One of them was to tap out the rhythm on a table and the other had to guess the song from that rhythm alone. On average, the listeners guessed only 3 out of 120 songs – a success rate of just 2.5%. Startlingly, though, when the tappers were asked to predict how many of the songs the listeners would guess, they reckoned the odds were 50/50 (50%). The tappers got their tune identified 1 time in 40, but they thought it would be 1 time in 2. Of course, the tappers were hearing the tune in their heads as they tapped. They couldn’t imagine what it was like for the listeners to hear isolated taps – more akin to Morse Code – rather than a song. The tappers’ knowledge had “cursed” them. In road safety terms, it Continue Reading
Overcoming urgent problems if a loved one is incapacitated by an accident
When someone is seriously injured in an accident, the effect does not stop with that person. In order to get a person’s life back on track after an accident, their family may need a lot of support too. Problems can pile up quickly. If the injured person is incapacitated – maybe in a coma – the rest of their family may soon be in crisis. How are your bills going to be paid? How are your children going to cope? Particular issues which can cause overwhelming strain include the inability to get access to the incapacitated person’s bank account in order that the day-to-day running of the family household can be maintained. These are problems you can plan for. And, even if you have not planned, there are still things you can do to overcome the difficulties. In this article, we’ll look at what you can do to plan for unexpected events such as this. We’ll then go on to look at what options you have to recover the situation if you need to try to sort things out after such a Continue Reading
Claiming for wage loss when you are not losing any wages
You don’t usually get something for nothing. We’ve talked about that issue before when answering the question: How does your personal injury solicitor make money if they do not charge you anything? In the context of a personal injury compensation claim, claiming for wage loss when you are not losing any wages sounds like getting something for nothing – getting a windfall - but it’s not like that at all. To understand how you might claim for future wage loss when you’re not currently losing any wages, we need to consider 3 things, which we’ll do in the remainder of this article. Firstly, how is wage loss normally calculated? Secondly, in what circumstances, might you be able to claim wage loss when you’re not losing any wages? And, finally, how is the calculation made? Let’s look at wage loss claims generally, for a start. If you have a personal injury claim, wage loss may be an important part of your claim. It may be the main reason you decided to make a claim at Continue Reading
What PPE duties do employers have?
How bad for you is 37 grammes of saturated fat? According to recommendations from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1992, a normal diet should contain no more than 20 grammes of saturated fat per day. Do you have any idea what 37 grammes of saturated fat looks like? USDA research found that a typical medium-sized bag of film theatre popcorn contained that much saturated fat. But unless you’re a nutritionist, the bare quantity '37g' might not be too great in convincing you of the riskiness of your movie-time snack. Instead, USDA got their message across by highlighting the other foods which taken together would contain the same dosage of artery-clogging fat as the apparently innocent between-meals filler - A Big Mac with chips, plusA bacon and eggs breakfast, plusA steak supper with all the trimmings, equals37g of saturated fat. The scientific analysis of the popcorn amounted to a risk assessment. USDA needed to get the hazardous results across to the Continue Reading
Don’t let your personal injury claim get thagomized (by getting a move on now)
Do you know what a thagomizer is? The thagomizer is an arrangement of 4 to 10 spikes on the tails of dinosaurs such as the Stegosaurus. The pointy bits provided a defensive weapon against predators. Stegosaurus was a herbivore. With a toothless beak and small teeth, it was not designed to eat flesh. Legendary cartoonist, Gary Larson, coined the term ‘thagomizer’ in his 1982 image of a caveman giving a PowerPoint presentation to colleagues and telling them it was so-called “after the late Thag Simmons”. Poor Thag. ‘Thagomizer’ has come to be adopted as an informal anatomical term. It’s used on the Stegosaurus display at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.. Clearly, Stegosaurus had a mighty sting in the tail, if required. Personal injury claims can have a sting in the tail too, if you don’t watch out. The cruel defence is one of ‘delay’. Wait too long and your claim will become unenforceable and lost forever. As we have discussed elsewhere, the Continue Reading