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
Avoiding Losing Money on Your Personal Injury Claim
Below you will find a series of articles on the Moray Claims website on the subject of “Avoiding losing money on your personal injury claim”.
There are lots of things you can do to help yourself, for example:
- maximise the value of your claim by keeping good records of outlays you incur in connection with medical treatment, travel expenses, medication and the like, so these can be fully reclaimed;
- don’t make up elements of your claim and avoid exaggeration;
- avoid hidden costs such as your solicitor or other representative levying charges against you on successful conclusion of your claim which mean the amount you actually receive is reduced when it maybe does not need to be.
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
Can You Get 100% Contributory Negligence?
As a chocolate lover, my taste is more for milk chocolate and white chocolate than for dark chocolate. If dark chocolate is married with another flavour, such as mint, I’m a big fan but, on its own, I’ll always prefer the other varieties of chocolate, if I can get them. With 100% dark chocolate, it means that all the ingredients have come from the cocoa bean. 100% dark chocolate is not to everyone’s taste because of its intense bitterness. In the world of personal injury claims, an area where ‘100%’ could leave an intensely bitter taste in your mouth is in relation to contributory negligence. What is contributory negligence? In the usual case, contributory negligence is where it’s accepted by the other party or their insurers that you should get some compensation for your losses. The catch is that they say it was partly due to your own fault that you got injured – so your full compensation should be reduced by a percentage to reflect your share of the blame. In Continue Reading
Work Accident Prosecution Delays Put Compensation Claims At Risk
If a worker is fatally injured as the result of an accident at work, there will often be an investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Available options include: the holding of a Fatal Accident Inquiry by the procurator fiscal; criminal prosecution of the employer and/or any other business which might have been "in control" of the workplace at the time of the accident under the Health and Safety at Work Act. Examples of employer prosecutions as the result of a fatal accident HSE publishes a weekly email bulletin - to which anyone can subscribe - which gives details of the latest health and safety breaches which have given rise to criminal convictions for businesses. The accidents involve life-changing injuries and some result in fatalities. Using as an example the most recent bulletin, we find several reports of fines imposed on businesses for deaths of workers in a variety of circumstances: A landscape gardener who fell under the wheels of a Continue Reading
Should you settle a personal injury claim without getting legal advice?
We would advise anyone who has been injured in an accident to get specialist legal advice as soon as possible. Economics alone suggest that you cannot rely on an insurance company to give you a fair deal, if you choose to handle your claim yourself. (Their primary duty is to their shareholders, not to you). Unfortunately, there are all sorts of other potential conflicts of interest for third party insurers as well. Only an independent, specialist solicitor will be truly on your side and hold your best interests as paramount. If you live in Moray or have suffered a personal injury accident in Moray, we can help with advice on a possible personal injury claim. We’ll help you directly if that's what is in your best interests. We will refer you on elsewhere if we think that’s a better option for you. Our main aim is to make sure everyone with a valid claim gets access to the justice they deserve through the solicitor who is best-placed to help them – in terms of experience, Continue Reading
Winning and losing your personal injury claim
If you live in Moray or have suffered a personal injury accident in Moray, we can help. If you have any questions about any aspect of our personal injury claims services at Moray Claims / Grigor & Young, please get in touch with us. You can send a Free Online Enquiry via this website (basically, it's an online method of sending us an email). You can also phone us. Our accredited specialist personal injury solicitors – Peter and Marie – are on (Elgin) 01343 544077. We’ll help you directly if that appears to be in your best interests. We might refer you on elsewhere if we think that’s a better option for you. Our main aim is to make sure everyone with a valid claim gets access to the justice they deserve through the solicitor who is best-placed to help them – in terms of expertise, experience and location. We don't want you, as an injured person, to end up winning and losing your personal injury claim - we just want you to experience the success part. Continue Reading
Should I Settle My Accident Injury Claim Directly With The Insurance Company?
If you have been hurt as the result of an accident, it is likely that the third party’s insurance company will contact you directly. You will probably have exchanged personal details with the other party to the accident and that information will be passed on to the other insurers if the accident is reported to them by their customer. Insurers have recognised this as a great opportunity to “get in first”. Where the insurance company for the other party sees that the accident is likely to be the fault of their insured, if they move swiftly, they can get to you before you are in touch with your own insurers. The “prize” as far as they are concerned is the chance to offer money to settle any personal injury claim you might have - before you have had time to get proper legal advice and intimate the claim. Third party capture There are different terms for this procedure, depending on your point of view. Solicitors who represent the interests of injury victims refer to it as Continue Reading
2 Ways Exaggeration of Injuries Can Damage Your Personal Injury Claim
Exaggerating your symptoms from injuries can damage your chances of claiming compensation Serious injuries can lead to permanent restrictions in things like your ability to work, to care for yourself and others close to you, or enjoy your hobbies. If that is what you claim following an accident, you need to realise it’s likely that all aspects of your life will end up under the microscope. Exaggeration of injuries can damage your personal injury claim. How will you be found out? Your life: nothing hidden You will be shadowed and put under video surveillance. Private investigators will stake out your home. You could be filmed in your garden, getting into and out of your car or doing the shopping. A prime time for observation is when you have to go and see any medical expert appointed by the insurers: they know exactly where you will be and at what times on that particular day. Surveillance cameras may be hand held, mounted in vehicles or in holdalls carried by Continue Reading
How A Minute Of Tender Can Destroy Your Personal Injury Claim
A Minute of Tender can be an effective weapon in a Scottish personal injury court action A Minute of Tender is a device used in Scottish personal injury court actions which can undermine – and, at worst, destroy - your claim for compensation. For that reason, it is worthwhile understanding how Minutes of Tender work. So, firstly, we need to go back a bit – to before the court action. When will you need a court action? If your personal injury claim cannot be settled by negotiation, you will have to raise a court action. Generally, for that to happen, your solicitor will have to assess that your claim has a better than 50/50 chance of success. In the worst case, the dispute will be about whether you should get any compensation at all. A less serious problem is where it is just the value of the claim which cannot be agreed. In other words, there is agreement that some compensation should be paid but the opposing insurers are not offering a reasonable amount. How Continue Reading
Medical Treatment Following Personal Injury (Keep Going Until You Are Discharged)
"Spine once more" found on flickrcc.net One of the frustrations for solicitors helping victims of accidents with their compensation claims is where medical records show that the injured person did not take up all the treatment which was available to them while recovering from their injuries. The “pain and suffering” value of your personal injury claim depends, broadly, on the severity of the initial injury and the length of time it takes you to make a full recovery. You rarely win if it's "you versus your medical records" Whilst your own evidence about the duration and extent of your symptoms will carry some weight, it is likely to be trumped by anything inconsistent contained in your medical records. So, for example, it will be difficult to argue two years after an accident that you have continuing shoulder pain related to the accident if your GP referred to you for physiotherapy at the 6-month mark and you failed to attend at all or stopped going for treatment before Continue Reading
You Didn’t Wear A Seatbelt: Can You Still Claim?
Click Clack, Front ‘n’ Back. Though there are other famous public information campaigns dating from the 1970s, seatbelt laws did not come into force in the UK until 1983. Regulations for children to wear seatbelts followed in 1989 and then for seatbelts in the rear seats in 1991. It took a while for many people to wear seatbelts regularly but now it has become the accepted norm for anyone getting into a motor vehicle. Most car manufacturers install alarm systems to alert the occupants when a seatbelt is not engaged and the vehicle is in motion. In spite of the rules, there are still some people who will not willingly wear a seatbelt and there are in fact exemptions for certain people. You will still have a claim but your compensation will be reduced If you are unfortunate enough to have suffered injury in an accident whilst not wearing your seatbelt, you will probably still be able to make a claim for personal injury. The down side is that there may Continue Reading
Not Wearing A Seatbelt: How It Can Affect Your Personal Injury Claim
General issues about contributory negligence in PI cases In many personal injury claims, though it’s clear that the accident was the fault of someone else – which means the claim should succeed - there can be arguments about whether you as the injured person should share some of the blame for the accident. This is what is referred to as contributory negligence. It is often possible to counter arguments for contributory negligence, meaning that your claim succeeds in full. It is up to the other side to prove contributory negligence applies in the circumstances rather than being up to you to prove that you did take proper care for your own safety. If contributory negligence applies, your compensation will be reduced. In our experience, across the personal injury accident spectrum, reduction rates most often tend to be in the 10% to 25% range. In other words, for example, if contributory negligence is 25% then you lose one quarter of your damages. Why the level of Continue Reading