The modern car seatbelt was invented by a former aviation engineer, whose experience included working on ejector seats. By 1959, cars had seatbelts but only two-point waist restraints. In a car accident, this often did the wearer as much harm as good. Volvo engineer, Nils Bohlin, created a design which anchored the straps low beside the seat. This meant that the geometry of the belts formed a “V” - pointing at the floor – and that the belt would remain in place and not shift under sudden loading. Such a significant advance in driver and passenger safety could have netted Volvo a fortune on the patent. Instead, they gave it away. They decided that the invention was so revolutionary that its value should not profit their company but be a free, life-saving tool. In the world of personal injury claims, if you fail to wear a seat belt and are injured in a road traffic accident, you don’t expect to be free from blame. As we’ve examined elsewhere on this website, UK personal injury Continue Reading
Why Insurance Is Crucial In Personal Injury Claims
On one level, the idea behind personal injury law is simple. You have suffered an injury as the result of the wrongful or negligent conduct of someone else. You seek financial compensation from them. The intention of the law is that the money you claim should somehow put you back in the position you would have been in if you had not been injured. But financial compensation is not like for like. It rarely, if ever, achieves the goal of making up for the injury losses you have suffered. This problem is most acute where the injuries are very serious. Money for the loss of a limb is never going to be a magic wand that reverses the effects of the injuries. With minor injuries, which could be described more as an inconvenience and where a full recovery is more likely, monetary compensation works better as a remedy but still imperfectly. “That personal injury claim was a nice wee earner and I’d happily have another one next week” – said no genuinely-injured person ever. Most personal Continue Reading
How Social Media Surveillance Can Undermine Your Personal Injury Claim
There are those who predicted that the years from 2010 to 2020 would become known as the "transparency" decade, in which no one would be able to "live a lie". It is perhaps not turning out to be as clear-cut as it might have seemed then, especially when we are having such issues with fake news and the apparent smokescreens created by certain people and organisations in positions of power. It is hard to remember that there was once a time when you did not always know what your friends were up to. A time long ago when, in order to hear their news, you would need to phone them or arrange to meet them face-to-face. Since Facebook began in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, there has been an explosion in the use of social media. On the internet, something like 1400 blog posts are produced every minute. Dozens of hours of video are uploaded per minute. And tens of thousands of images are shared every minute. Facebook data from May 2016 indicated that there were 36.45 million users in the Continue Reading
How a Criminal Conviction helps with a Personal Injury Claim
A personal injury claim arising from an incident which took place in a Lossiemouth pizza takeaway has provided a good example of how a criminal conviction can be used in a personal injury claim to pave the way for the claim to succeed. This is a procedural decision from the All-Scotland Personal Injury Court in Edinburgh. In this article we will consider three aspects of how a criminal conviction helps with a personal injury claim. Firstly, we will look at the law in relation to the use of criminal convictions in civil proceedings such as personal injury claims. Secondly, we will see how the reference to a criminal conviction in the Lossiemouth case helped the claimant establish that compensation should be payable to him. Finally, we will look at the question of whether it is ever possible for a person who is blamed for an accident/injury to argue their way out of it even if there is a criminal conviction against them. Continue Reading