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
Personal Injury Claims True or False Quiz
Here are 12 questions about personal injury claims in Scotland. There are some local, Moray elements thrown in too. This covers things like: Valuation of claimsCommon types of claim, andTime limits At the end, we'll tell you your score and the answers. Continue Reading
Restarting Personal Injury Claims in the Sheriff Court
Personal injury claims in the Sheriff Court are more or less at a standstill. Though the lockdown was quite sudden when it came, in some ways, it had been predicted. Scottish Courts and Tribunal Service (SCTS) had been making positive noises about how it might be possible to keep the litigation process going by means of telephone conferencing or written submissions. However, the guidance issued for Sheriff Courts on 25 March 2020 indicated that only essential court business would proceed. For most types of civil court business – including personal injury and family law cases – the litigation process was frozen. Civil court hearings for personal injury actions scheduled for final hearings with witnesses between March and June 2020 were postponed. This applies across all Sheriff Courts, including our own local Elgin Sheriff Court. There has been criticism of the apparent slowness of the courts to adapt. Here's a report from the website of the Law Society of Continue Reading
Claiming successfully for an accident at work though you did something silly
Have you ever panicked that you have mislaid your mobile phone? And that while you are in the middle of a conversation with someone on your mobile phone? This happens to me regularly. So many things compete for our attention and so much of the activity that fills our day is done almost unconsciously, on autopilot. The repetitiveness of everyday life dulls our concentration and our short-term memories. Sometimes distractions can be a source of danger, whether that’s while you’re descending the stairs in your house or crossing the street or working on a production line. In this article we are going to concentrate on accidents at work. We will look at 3 different accident scenarios where you might think the injured employee 'should have known better' yet still claimed successfully. Firstly, we’ll look at the case of the exposed window cleaner. Then, we’ll go on to consider the case of the labourer with inappropriate footwear. Finally, we’ll go over the case of the bus Continue Reading
Free of charge help with your personal injury claim from a solicitor (even if your claim succeeds)?
It’s natural to be suspicious if someone seems to be offering you something valuable in return for nothing. We are all conditioned to think that if something sounds “too good to be true”, then it must in fact be too good to be true. There are times when we’re vulnerable to letting our guard down – for example, if it’s something we really want – and system tools have evolved to provide some protection. For example, many spam filters will catch emails with “free” in the subject line because use of that one word alone indicates dodgy intentions on the part of the sender. But just because a service is offered as 'provided free of charge' to you, it's not necessarily dodgy as long as the service provider is getting by some other method - such as happens with solicitors working for claimants with personal injury claims. We invite folk to ask questions via this website. A fair few of the questions that we receive show that there is still disbelief that we can offer a personal Continue Reading
Prevention of needless injuries (the APIL manifesto)
How many accidents are there in the UK each year which cause injury to people? One estimate is 1.6 million – totalling up harmful incidents across workplaces, hospitals and on the roads. (There were 560,000 casualties on the roads in 2018). All of these are preventable injuries. Yet they can have permanent, life-changing consequences not just for the injury victims but also for their families. On the other side of the picture, the wrongdoer who caused the injuries – an employer, the NHS, a business, a local authority – can suffer damage to reputation as well as financial cost. Every year, the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) hosts Injury Prevention Day. It encourages us all to think about ways we can adjust our conduct to minimise the risk of harm to others (e.g. avoiding tailgating the vehicle in front if we are driving). Everyone has a part to play in reducing accidental injuries but, for maximum effectiveness, the lead has to come from government. It is our Continue Reading