If you’ve suffered a personal injury, then you might be feeling emotionally drained by both the incident itself, and the process of receiving medical care and recovering. The prospect of seeking a legal remedy might therefore be one you’re keen to avoid. But this would, in many cases, be a mistake. Often, taking legal action for a personal injury doesn’t involve much, if any, participation on the part of the claimant. What’s more, the damages you are awarded might help you to deal with the costs of getting the medical care you need, both now and in the future.
Understanding Personal Injury Claims
It’s worth taking a moment to consider what a personal injury actually is, and what the process of making a claim actually involves.
A personal injury is any injury suffered by a person. It might take the form of a physical injury, like a broken limb, or it might take the form of a psychological one, like stress or depression. So, a wide range of potential incidents might fall into this legal category, including road traffic accidents, workplace injuries, and medical negligence.
If there’s a party at fault for your injury, then you might seek to extract damages from them. This might be the proprietor of a restaurant, upon whose slippery wet floor you slipped. Or, it might be a medical practitioner who prescribed the wrong treatment.
The Claims Process: Step-by-Step
An effective claims process usually follows a fairly rigid sequence of events. You’ll first recruit a solicitor, who will consult with you in order to establish that the claim is viable. Many solicitors, particularly those specialising in medical negligence, will proceed on a no-win, no-fee basis. For this to be profitable, they’ll need to be reasonably certain of a win.
Once you have legal representation on your side, you’ll be able to seek out the appropriate evidence for your claim. This might mean medical records, witness statements, accident forms, and CCTV footage. The parties involved will need to surrender any evidence relevant to the case – though compelling them to do so might require the experience of a good solicitor.
Having gathered the evidence, you’ll need to then notify the would-be defendant and their insurer. This is something that you’ll typically do through your solicitor. In many cases, the responsible party will seek to settle the matter out of court, lowering costs for everyone. The only exceptions tend to occur when the relevant legal precedents are obscure and unsettled. If you’re making a relatively common claim, then the chances are near certain that a settlement will be reached.
If a settlement isn’t reached, however, you’ll escalate the matter to a courtroom, where it will be adjudicated.
Time Limits for Filing a Claim
In the UK, a personal injury claim must generally be set into motion within three years of the claimant becoming aware off the injury. The only exceptions relate to young people, and those who lack the capacity to recognise or draw attention to their injury. In the former case, the three-year countdown will start from the claimant’s eighteenth birthday, which means that they’ll effectively have until they’re twenty-one.
Special Considerations: Brain Injury Claims
Brain injury claims are a relatively special case. Here, the court must not only consider the injury itself, but the effect that it might have had on the claimant’s ability to bring the case in the first place. The medical assessments involved are also complex, because the brain is a complex and poorly understood organ.
Brain injuries tend to be severely debilitating, with long-term implications for future care. Handling them sensitively in a courtroom often requires the skill of a specialised solicitor with experience in brain injury claims.
Types of Compensation Available
In personal injury cases, compensation is dispensed not just according to the pain and suffering endured by the claimant (called ‘general’ damages), but also for financial losses incurred as a result of the injury (‘special’ damages). The courtroom will also consider the potential cost of care in the future, and how that might be covered.
© Copyright 2025 Antonia, All rights Reserved. Written For: Tidylife
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