One of the first things a personal injury solicitor will consider, if you have a potential claim, is how you are going to get paid. (Yes, they’ll also think about how they might get paid for any work they do, but the first consideration has to be how easily you will recover compensation). It’s partly about whether you’re likely to be entitled to compensation - can you prove breach of duty or negligence? Fundamentally, though, it’s about ensuring as far as possible that, assuming your claim does succeed, someone will be there to pick up the tab – to pay you the compensation. Ideally, you want to know that there is insurance cover and that an insurance company will pay out on your claim. In this article, we will look at three aspects of insurance in relation to personal injury claims. Firstly, when can it happen that there is no insurance? Second, in which situations ought there to be insurance to cover personal injury compensation? And, finally, what steps does the law take to Continue Reading
Getting the sack for making a personal injury claim (health and safety protections)
The fear of being dismissed. It’s a fear that prevents many people claiming compensation for personal injury sustained at work. We’ve considered this general issue in other articles. In this article, we focus on protections which might apply via employment law, and health and safety law. It’s a discussion of health and safety at work, workplace danger and sections 44 and 100 of the Employment Rights Act 1996. Employers have extensive health and safety duties towards employees. And also to workers, self-employed people and visitors to their workplaces. The principal legislation in relation to health and safety is the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. This sets out basic health and safety duties. They apply to companies, directors, managers and employees. As the director or owner of a company, you have potential personal liability as well: you can't hide behind your company. The nature and extent of the duties in practice will depend very much on the type of business concerned. The Continue Reading
Why an accident in Scotland means you need advice from a Scottish solicitor
If you have an accident in Scotland, you need to get advice from a Scottish solicitor. People contact us with personal injury related questions via this website from all over the place (not always in the UK and not always even in Europe). Where the enquiry is about an accident that happened outwith Scotland, we cannot help you directly but we can often use our professional contacts to point you in the right direction. It’s even more focused than "Scotland" for us, however, because we concentrate our main efforts on helping clients in our home area of Moray and a bit beyond that. One phone enquiry we received recently caused us a lot of concern and that’s the seed for this article: The risk that you might have a question about injuries arising from an accident in Scotland but not get advice from a Scottish solicitor. Here’s (an anonymised version of) the scenario that came from the phone enquiry mentioned above. A parent of the caller had died as the result of a road Continue Reading
Why cyclists must get legal advice about a possible personal injury claim
The volume of water that breaks off Antartica as icebergs each year is greater than the total global consumption of freshwater. And icebergs are pure freshwater. Not for the first time, schemes have been proposed to tow icebergs to hot, water-stressed regions of the world. In Spring 2018, for example, before the rains finally came, the four million people in Cape Town, South Africa, came perilously close to ‘Day Zero’ – when they would run out of water. Though the idea of using icebergs in this way originated as long ago as the 19th Century, no plan has ever been put into action. The idea makes even more sense when you think of icebergs otherwise being “wasted” by melting into the salty seas. Of course, another feature of icebergs is that much more of them lie below the waterline than above. Ships need to be aware that initial appearances are deceptive where icebergs are concerned. In this article, we are going to consider why a superficial approach does not work and why Continue Reading