“Can I buy or sell a house without a solicitor?” Grigor & Young have newspaper cuttings books back to the 19th century, and that’s how one cutting from the mid-1980s is headlined. The body text continues: “In theory, you can do much of the work yourself. In theory, you can also remove your own appendix – given a sharp knife, a reliable textbook and a bit of practice.” Seth Godin picked up on this theme of expertise in a post on his daily blog. He asked: “Okay, how hard can it be? (to be an expert). Actually, it might be very hard. Actually, expertise has value. Actually, just because someone said it on the internet doesn’t mean it’s true. Or useful.” What’s the chance you’d be able to do such conveyancing or (especially) surgery yourself? Limited, you would think. Less than 10%? Less than 1%? And a small chance is what you would expect to have, in general, if you were hoping to overturn a finding of 10% contributory negligence in a personal injury Continue Reading
Pocket that phone and help prevent needless injuries on the roads
It does not look the sort of road you would expect to see a pedestrian try to cross. Other than at traffic lights. Or using a bridge or underpass. Viewed through the dashcam of the slow-moving car in queuing traffic, we can see it’s an urban environment. The road has 4 lanes in each direction (we’re in the 3rd lane). A continuous concrete barrier about 4 feet high forms the central reservation. A young woman steps off the pavement to our left and begins crossing from left to right – for her, crossing the first half of the road. She’s on her mobile. She’s holding it up to her right ear. We can see her left hand gesturing as she chats. The field of view is distorted by the wide angle lens of the dashcam – it makes things look further away than they are in fact. As the woman crosses in front of our vehicle, she bows slightly to thank us for making room for her to pass through. The outside lane to our right has been empty throughout the 8 seconds or so since she Continue Reading
What PPE duties do employers have?
How bad for you is 37 grammes of saturated fat? According to recommendations from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1992, a normal diet should contain no more than 20 grammes of saturated fat per day. Do you have any idea what 37 grammes of saturated fat looks like? USDA research found that a typical medium-sized bag of film theatre popcorn contained that much saturated fat. But unless you’re a nutritionist, the bare quantity '37g' might not be too great in convincing you of the riskiness of your movie-time snack. Instead, USDA got their message across by highlighting the other foods which taken together would contain the same dosage of artery-clogging fat as the apparently innocent between-meals filler - A Big Mac with chips, plusA bacon and eggs breakfast, plusA steak supper with all the trimmings, equals37g of saturated fat. The scientific analysis of the popcorn amounted to a risk assessment. USDA needed to get the hazardous results across to the Continue Reading
Personal Injury Claims True or False Quiz
Here are 12 questions about personal injury claims in Scotland. There are some local, Moray elements thrown in too. This covers things like: At the end, we'll tell you your score and the answers. Should have any questions at all, please get in touch with us. All enquiries are free of charge and without obligation. See the article HERE, if you want to understand more about what will actually happen if you get in touch with us about making a personal injury compensation claim in Moray. Continue Reading
Claiming successfully for an accident at work though you did something silly
Have you ever panicked that you have mislaid your mobile phone? And that while you are in the middle of a conversation with someone on your mobile phone? This happens to me regularly. So many things compete for our attention and so much of the activity that fills our day is done almost unconsciously, on autopilot. The repetitiveness of everyday life dulls our concentration and our short-term memories. Sometimes distractions can be a source of danger, whether that’s while you’re descending the stairs in your house or crossing the street or working on a production line. In this article we are going to concentrate on accidents at work. We will look at 3 different accident scenarios where you might think the injured employee 'should have known better' yet still claimed successfully. Firstly, we’ll look at the case of the exposed window cleaner. Then, we’ll go on to consider the case of the labourer with inappropriate footwear. Finally, we’ll go over the case of the bus Continue Reading
If you travel with a drunk driver and get injured
If you travel with a drunk driver and get injured due to their bad driving, does that mean you can’t claim? A September 2019 poll commissioned by Glasgow-based solicitors, Dallas MacMillan, indicated that two-thirds of those polled believed that if you agree to be a passenger in a car driven by someone you know is under the influence of alcohol, you won’t be able to claim compensation from the driver if they crash the car and you’re injured. This 66% (or so) majority are mistaken in their understanding of the law. People injured in such circumstances can claim successfully – and you may be surprised by how fully they can claim. We agree that travelling with a driver who is under the influence is a very bad idea. On the other hand, you should not lose sight of the fact that passengers in vehicles very rarely have no compensation claim available to them if they are injured in an accident. In this article, we’ll look at the law on accidents involving passengers in vehicles driven Continue Reading
Avoiding Child Pedestrian Accidents
School crossing patrols stopped in Moray from 20 August 2019. Meaning no more lollipop people to guide our children across the roads. We have to hope that the publicity this controversial Council cutback has received will mean all drivers will take extra special care when in the vicinity of any Moray school. In this article, we will consider 3 matters in relation to pedestrian road traffic accidents involving children. Firstly, we will consider the evidence about road safety measures such as school crossing patrols and why they provide useful benefits. We will then go on to look at the relative duties of drivers and child pedestrians and what scope there is for some of the blame falling on the injured child (contributory negligence). Finally, by means of an example, we will examine the issues that can arise along with contributory negligence, including possible shifting of blame onto a parent who has not taken proper care for their child's safety (in letting them out alone Continue Reading
How safe are you on Moray’s roads?
1,793 people were killed on Britain’s roads in 2017. That figure comes from statistics published by the Road Safety Foundation ('RSF') in July 2019. It means that average of 73 people were killed or seriously injured on Britain’s roads every day. In spite of ongoing improvements in vehicle safety, the annual number of fatalities has changed little since 2011. Across Europe as a whole, the ambitious long-term goal is that, by 2050, we should be getting close to zero road deaths – which would mean road travel achieving similar safety levels to rail and air travel. The good news in Scotland is that we have made measurable progress in improving road safety over the last 3 years. During that time, the risk of death and serious injury has fallen by about 7% across motorways and ‘A’ roads in Scotland. Scotland now has the lowest rate for deaths/serious injury per head of population for travel on major routes – at 13 per billion vehicle kilometres. (In England, it’s 15 and, in Continue Reading
Why staying power is important if liability for an accident is denied
This is a case study of an injury claim arising from a pavement tripping accident. We’ll go through the stages of the claim from intimation of claim to the point where insurers admitted liability. It was not a straightforward process. In our experience, that is not unusual. We hope this will give you an illustration of what can happen with a personal injury claim for tripping injuries. The facts show why perseverance with a claim may be necessary. Here’s a photo of the pavement where the injured person fell. At the time of the accident, the injured person was walking into the photo (i.e. away from the cameraman). The injured person's left foot went down on the edge of hole at a point where it was about 3cm deep. This caused them to go over on their left ankle and suffer an inversion injury to it. Scottish local authorities generally have a duty to repair pavement defects once they produce a height difference of more than 2cm (20mm). This is a height difference Continue Reading
Why a cyclist’s fault for an accidental injury can have drastic financial consequences
Ned Ryerson must be one of the most beloved “annoying” characters in film history. He is the insurance salesman from Phil Connors’ past who keeps turning up to bug Phil. He appears at the same point on Phil’s walk from his Punxsutawney guesthouse to Gobbler's Knob, as Groundhog Day repeats over and over again. It’s one of my all-time favourite films – one which includes a happy ending for Ned, as he explains: “I have not seen this guy for 20 years but he comes up to me and then he buys whole life, term, uniflex, fire, theft, auto, dental, health – with the optional death and dismemberment plan – water damage… Phil, this is the best day of my life!” The “optional death and dismemberment plan” may be a joke (maybe it isn’t) but the list of so many different types of insurance illustrates that insurance is varied and can be complicated. And while it’s possible to be over-insured, so it’s possible to be under-insured – and under-insurance is one of the things we’ll look at Continue Reading
What are the main reasons why a driver will be to blame for an accident?
Brené Brown is an American research professor. She is based at the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston. She is a best-selling author, covering topics such as shame, vulnerability, empathy and courage. Describing herself as a researcher and storyteller, in this revealing and entertaining animated video, she also describes herself as a “blamer”. She manages to make blaming her husband, Steve (for her dropping - and splashing over herself - a full cup of coffee), sound understandable and reasonable. All he did was come home half an hour late the evening before and shorten her night’s sleep by the same amount. But for his lateness, however, she wouldn’t have been so tired as to need the second cup of coffee she then spilt on herself. As Brene Brown asks: how many of us go to that place, when something bad happens? Where the first thing we want to know is: “whose fault is it?” And we’d rather it be our fault than no one's fault - because it gives Continue Reading
Slipping accident on retail premises: a case study
Ms S visited a fast food restaurant in Elgin at the end of a night out. She needed to use the customer toilets. She went through the door from the restaurant into the ceramic-tiled corridor which led to the toilets. Though she did not notice the fact until after she had fallen, the floor was wet. This caused her to slip. As a result of her fall, she suffered an injury to her back. A "wet floor" sign was put out in the corridor, immediately following her accident. She reported her accident to a member of staff at the time but it was not until the next day that she realised the severity of the injury. She had the presence of mind to write a letter to the manager of the fast food restaurant informing him of the fact and details of her accident. Grigor & Young made a compensation claim on Ms S’s behalf, in this case. At all times, liability was denied. The fast food restaurant did not accept that, in fact, the floor had been wet at the time. They did not accept Continue Reading