Choosing a solicitor to help with your personal injury claim

We received the following question in an enquiry via our website: “After a road accident (not own fault) is it better to claim personal injury through solicitor provided by my insurer or through independent solicitor?” Here are 5 things you could consider which might help you reach a decision on that issue. 1. How experienced and qualified is the person handling your claim? It would be nice to be able to take it as a “given" that the level of experience and expertise of the two types of adviser are the same. However, that is not necessarily safe to assume. Knowing whether your claim is going to be handled by a solicitor or by a paralegal (or by an administration person) could be important. If you're getting help from a solicitor, you have a clear benchmark of legal training. With a paralegal or claim handler, that's not so obvious. In general terms, you're looking for a solicitor who has a proven track record in dealing specifically with personal injury claims. All Continue Reading

Is one font better for your memory than another? Can the design of the typeface used to put information into a readable form make a difference to how well you will recall that information later? Research on this issue at RMIT University in Melbourne concluded that most of the fonts we see every day are similar. Their familiarity means we often glance over the words they form and no memory trace is created. On the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, if typography is too different from the norm, the brain does not process it well and, again, we don’t retain the information. Is there a way to overcome this balancing act between over-familiarity and unreadableness? RMIT has developed the font, Sans Forgetica, which could be the answer. They say it lies at a sweet spot where, although the appearance of the font forms something of a barrier to the learning process, overall it helps the learning process rather than hindering it. They have proved this via a mixed lab Continue Reading

When I was a child, my parents used to get the Reader’s Digest and I was fascinated by a regular feature in that, called "Drama in Real Life". They would have titles like: One Handhold from Death, 'Pull me out!' and The man who wouldn't jump. These articles would tell the story of how do someone survived a situation of great personal peril, which could be anything from a natural disaster to a hotel fire or an accident at work. Often, other people involved in the situation did not make it out alive. This would get me thinking about how better precautions or preventative measures might have been taken so as to avoid the injury and loss of life. As I grew older, I remember failings of frustration in situations where I felt powerless because I did not know my legal rights. It has been said that "If you don't know your rights, you don't have any". What I perceived as injustice in many situations really frustrated me. It got me thinking that, if I knew about my Continue Reading

(NOTE: This post contains a screencast video, below, with a walk-through of how best to use the Law Society of Scotland's "Find a Solicitor" Online Tool to locate a specialist personal injury solicitor who is local to you). You don’t have to use the solicitors your insurers may tell you to use for your personal injury claim. We recommend you to get help from a solicitor who meets two main criteria: They should be local, and they should be specialised. 1. Local solicitor We recommend you to engage the services of a local solicitor, if possible. What do we mean by local? Ideally, a solicitor who is local to you and local to the location of the accident. Even getting a solicitor who is local in only one of these two ways is probably better than a solicitor who is neither close to you nor the place where the accident happened. 2. Specialist solicitor These days, all solicitors are specialists to some extent. Personal injury law is a complex area and you need Continue Reading

In this article, we are considering the situation where you are making the decision between instructing a solicitor to represent your interests in a personal injury compensation claim and instructing someone else – such as a claims management company. We are not considering the situation where you are deciding between having a solicitor and representing your own interests. Grigor & Young LLP / Moray Claims have other articles about the pitfalls of a DIY personal injury claim and the perils of negotiating directly with the third party insurers. The 3 factors we want to highlight here are certainty, insurance and expertise. First of all, certainty. 1. It gives you certainty about who you are dealing with. Only those who undertake wide-ranging education, training and ongoing “Continuing Professional Development” are permitted to practise as a solicitor. At the moment, claims management companies are not regulated in Scotland. Anyone can set up a claims management Continue Reading