Funding a personal injury claim

Legal expenses insurance (LEI) is also known as legal protection insurance or even just legal insurance. It can pay for the cost of legal advice, if you need help, in a variety of scenarios - for example - a boundary dispute with a neighbouring property owner a building dispute with a tradesman who has done work on your house an employment dispute a personal injury compensation claim following an accident The insurance can cover you whether you are the person initiating the claim or the person against whom the claim is being made. The main benefit of LEI is that it provides you with a route to justice which may otherwise be too expensive for you to consider. It can be a stand-alone policy but is often an add-on to other insurance, such as house contents insurance. Types of LEI There’s an important distinction between ‘before the event’ (BTE) LEI and ‘after the event’ (ATE) LEI. The ‘event’ is the thing that's happened for which you need the legal advice Continue Reading

I was renewing my first aid qualification recently and some statistics really hit home. Less than 1 in 10 people in Britain survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. In countries where cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is taught in schools on the other hand (e.g. Norway), as many as 1 in 4 survive. It seems that providing folks with an early education in first aid fundamentals improves heart attack victims’ chances of making it through their experience alive. In the same way, a recent report by a group of international lawyers has argued that making Legal Expenses Insurance (LEI) more widely available would improve access to justice, giving some people a possible legal remedy where otherwise their chances would be as good as dead. In this article, we are going to consider 3 questions related to LEI. Firstly, what is LEI and what types of LEI exist? Secondly, who is most likely to benefit from taking out LEI? And, lastly, why you should make a general check of Continue Reading

In other articles, we have discussed how legal expenses insurance can help minimise the cost risk to you if you need to make a personal injury claim for compensation. The term “legal expenses insurance” can include both before-the-event (BTE) insurance and after-the-event (ATE) insurance. With ATE insurance, the insurance policy is taken out after the accident in order to cover the risk of having to pay the opponent’s legal costs (for example, if you raise a court action but the claim fails and you lose). BTE insurance covers against future legal costs but was in place before the event which gave rise to the claim, such as the accident which has caused the personal injury for which you need to claim compensation. BTE insurance generally limits your freedom to choose your own legal representative because claimants are directed to use firms of solicitors which are on the BTE insurer’s approved panel. Panel firms may be located a considerable distance from your home, especially Continue Reading

We criticise insurance companies on this blog quite often. Of course, insurance companies are frequently critical of solicitors who help people to make personal injury claims. They are also critical of claimants themselves. As well as people with possible personal injury compensation claims, we get a lot of enquiries from people who are worried that some sort of compensation claim might be made against them. If they have insurance cover, they are not sure if they should use it. If you have insurance that will help you defend a claim against you for personal injury (or property damage), you should make use of it. Here are a couple of very recent examples. The first scenario is a road traffic accident. Of course, in theory, it is compulsory to have motor insurance to cover you against the risk of liability to a 3rd party. In this case, the person making the enquiry to us had been driving at night in a suburban area. There was street lighting. The car in front was Continue Reading

I was sad to read that one of my all-time favourite bands, Rush, are "basically done" after 41 years of music making. At times, as a child, I would listen to their LPs incessantly and many of the lyrics have stuck with me through my life. A Farewell to Kings (1977) was the first Rush record I bought and these words are from the title song: When they turn the pages of history When these days have passed long ago Will they read of us with sadness For the seeds that we let grow? We turned our gaze From the castles in the distance Eyes cast down On the path of least resistance Cities full of hatred Fear and lies Withered hearts And cruel, tormented eyes Scheming demons Dressed in kingly guise Beating down the multitude And scoffing at the wise As Rush sang in another song (Circumstances), quoting famous words attributed to Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr from the mid-19th century: "The more that things change, the more they stay the same." 40 years on, the last 4 Continue Reading