injury claims

[blue]

just wondering if any of you fine chaps know anything about this.

i broke my ankle when i went over on a hole in the road in june 2006.  now, it never really crossed my mind to put in a claim for damages, i guess i'm just old fahioned! but my girlfriend reckons i should still claim and that it's not too late.  i must admit, a little cash would be very welcome at the minute.  anyway, i spoke to a claims company, and they say that while it hasn't been three years yet, it is too late for them to deal with.  anyone know what, if anything, i can do?

[Jonny]

I think you missed out.

[Roobubba]

I'm generally against that kind of thing. The money has to come from somewhere, and I think the compensation culture of the US which is becoming more and more prevalent here doesn't really help anyone in the long run.
It's bad enough with parking attendants who are there solely to make money for their own wages (and not doing ANYTHING for the sake of the flow of traffic or easing obstruction problems).
I'm thinking of becoming a communist.

Roo

[blue]

i would always have agreed with you Roo, don't agree with the whole compensation culture.  i'm not massively dissappointed if i can't claim, as i said, it never even crossed my mind before, although some money would be nice.  a woman had a very minor accident with my girlfriend just under 3 years ago and has just put in a claim out of the blue, looking for £10,000!! she had no injuries at the time.  this is what prompted her to persuade me to pursue this.  when you mention parking attendants;  i got a parking ticket last week! a £60 fine for being 12 minutes over what i had paid for.  while the car behind me on double yellow lines got nothing.  these things do induce rage.

[gwEm]

a member of my family was given an injury last year. she was told at the time that realistic limit was 6 months after injury for a claim to be successful.

[gwEm]

I'm generally against that kind of thing. The money has to come from somewhere, and I think the compensation culture of the US which is becoming more and more prevalent here doesn't really help anyone in the long run.
It's bad enough with parking attendants who are there solely to make money for their own wages (and not doing ANYTHING for the sake of the flow of traffic or easing obstruction problems).
I'm thinking of becoming a communist.

Roo

b0llocks!

if someone spills bleach in your eyes or whatever, you're entitled to compensation

[indysmith]

I'm generally against that kind of thing. The money has to come from somewhere, and I think the compensation culture of the US which is becoming more and more prevalent here doesn't really help anyone in the long run.
It's bad enough with parking attendants who are there solely to make money for their own wages (and not doing ANYTHING for the sake of the flow of traffic or easing obstruction problems).
I'm thinking of becoming a communist.

Roo

b0llocks!

if someone spills bleach in your eyes or whatever, you're entitled to compensation

But it obviously depends on the situation and the incident

[gwEm]

indeed, passionate response due to the situation of said family member. actually a couple of my family have had some pretty bad injuries due to someone elses negligence, and I do feel they're genuine.

[Roobubba]

I'm generally against that kind of thing. The money has to come from somewhere, and I think the compensation culture of the US which is becoming more and more prevalent here doesn't really help anyone in the long run.
It's bad enough with parking attendants who are there solely to make money for their own wages (and not doing ANYTHING for the sake of the flow of traffic or easing obstruction problems).
I'm thinking of becoming a communist.

Roo

b0llocks!

if someone spills bleach in your eyes or whatever, you're entitled to compensation

Someone pours bleach in your eyes, I agree, you are entitled to compensation from them, and they should be held criminally responsible.

You fall off a stepladder because you neglected to secure it properly and didn't make sure it was level, you are a fool and have no-one to blame but yourself.

It's completely context dependent, and while it's difficult in some cases to apportion blame or not, the increasing prevalence of compensation culture is swaying the balance more towards the notion that "if anything bad happens, it MUST have been someone's fault, and I should gain monetarily from it".

With that said, I wish I'd got the details of the guy who knocked me off my bike a year and a bit ago. I ended up with fairly major surgery, considerable extra commuting cost due to not being able to drive when I took on my new job, not being able to play guitar for a few months, so no band... It was entirely his fault, because he had been cycling on the pavement, and pulled out onto the road (where I was cycling in the same direction) without looking, without signalling, and directly in front of me. I think I probably would want to take legal action against him for that, because it was totally negligent, and blame could be directly apportioned (like the bleach example you gave, gwEm).

What I object to the most is that the companies who advertise about this ('you could be entitled to money!') never, ever, EVER say where that money comes from. Some of the examples they have are really poor - where people did stupid things, or didn't take care, or GENUINE accidents that really couldn't reasonably have been avoided. In those cases, I think compensation companies do a great public disservice by their fostering of the opinion that the 'victim' is always 'entitled' to compensation.

/rant

Roo

[Elliot]

There is no such thing as 'a genuine accident' - there is a situation where the 'victim' was negligent (failing to secure a ladder), someone else was negligent (like knocking someone off their ladder) or both parties were at fault (a person crashed into a ladder that had not been secured properly).  The only things that don't fall into that are 'acts of God' (lightning bolt coming out of the sky and electrifying the ladder, although you'd be pretty negligent going out in a lightning storm). 

In a complex society people/corporations, etc have a moral duty to act with reasonable care and attention towards other people around them.  If they do something inherently dangerous (like driving a car) they need to be careful.  If they can't guarantee that they will always be safe (which they can't) they need insurance to compensate people for failures in care and attention.  I don't see what is objectionable about this. 

As to compensation culture - in the old days (1990s) you never heard about it because people got legal aid (i.e. tax payers money) to fight their cases. But the government wanted to save money, so they abolished legal aid for most civil claims.  But this meant that ordinary people could no longer make claims on genuine cases because the risks of costs were so high.  So the government effectively privatised legal aid by allowing no-win, no-fee, with an uplift to the winner paid out of the otherside's costs (which was not allowed in the 1990s).  In the past lawyers would get paid win or lose on a legal aid claim.  As a result of the transition from legal aid to claims have gone down, because lawyers will not fight cases they aren't going to win.  So the insurers pay up without the court run around.

[Elliot]

BTW Blue - if you have a case, you have to issue your claim form at Court by June to avoid limitiation running out, although you a few months longer to serve it on the Defendant.  I would see a lawyer quickish.

[Will]

I have burnt my arm from the bright light of welding, I could claim that no gloves were provided by my employer :lol:
Johnny Mac really deserves some compensation though, I thought this thread was going to be his

[Johnny Mac]

Roo, it annoys me too but these legal companys wouldn't take on lame claims that they know won't get anywhere or they would lose money. I think the ads have to be that way or they may have someone who thinks they are not entitled miss out. My parents generation are a good example of that. They just put up with things as part of life.

I know that traffic wardens are a pain in the butt, well it was for the one I kicked back in the 90s haha. Can you imagine how a city like London would be if the threat of a fine for inconsiderate parking wasn't in place?
I do think they go too far though ticketing HGVs when they deliver to pubs/shops/restaurants as the price of the tickets that get issued, sometimes multiple tickets on daily basis, get passed on to the consumer.

[Roobubba]

Roo, it annoys me too but these legal companys wouldn't take on lame claims that they know won't get anywhere or they would lose money. I think the ads have to be that way or they may have someone who thinks they are not entitled miss out. My parents generation are a good example of that. They just put up with things as part of life.

I know that traffic wardens are a pain in the butt, well it was for the one I kicked back in the 90s haha. Can you imagine how a city like London would be if the threat of a fine for inconsiderate parking wasn't in place?
I do think they go too far though ticketing HGVs when they deliver to pubs/shops/restaurants as the price of the tickets that get issued, sometimes multiple tickets on daily basis, get passed on to the consumer.

Aside from being a biological product of that generation, I think I'm probably also a psychological product of it. I can be a bit old-fashioned sometimes!
Don't get me wrong about parking: I'm very careful to park considerately and legally (I'm one of these 'do nothing wrong' worrier types in general), and I expect others to do the same. When they don't, I'm annoyed if nothing is done about it. You make a very good point about ticketing of HGVs. The other month I saw a traffic warden writing a ticket for a truck at the front of it when at the back the driver was unloading the water/food for whatever hotel it was near. I now wish I'd gone over to challenge that total ****wit of a traffic warden, and I certainly will if I see something like that in the future. They are a strange case in our society, though (thank ****), not every public service has yet been turned into a public wallet-rape department.
But I digress.

[Will]

I do believe you can get such stupid parking tickets written off. I got given a book to read about how to get around police / traffic wardens