Wilsons Solicitors

These are the ones that seem to have caught most attention over recent years and for good reason. A car is a huge chunking lump of metal with a wheel on each corner, and if it happens to be rolled in the wrong direction and injures somebody then that almost invariably must be somebody's fault, and usually that of the driver. As a result anybody injured can claim compensation, and even people who are not injured can get compensation if their car is damaged, for example.

The only possible argument that can arise, and that not particularly frequently, is whose fault it was. In most cases it is pretty obvious which one of the drivers was at fault, and if it's one of those accidents where only one vehicle is involved it can only be one.

If it's a rear end shunt, it's almost impossible for the chap behind to argue that it was the fault of the driver in front because you are supposed to drive so that you can stop within the distance you can see ahead. If it's an accident involving a pedestrian, then the same result applies for the same reason, except in those very rare cases where it can be shown that the pedestrian almost literally threw themselves into the road in front of the car.

But not all accident claims arise out of accidents on the road. Accidents happen all over the place.

Another not uncommon example is where people have accidents by tripping over holes in the pavement. The Queen's highway is suppose to be maintained in a safe state by the local authority, but local authority budgets are stretched and they don't do this job as thoroughly as they should do. As a result people have accidents and they are usually entitled to claim compensation from the local authority.

Other accident claims arise from incidents indoors. For example, if you trip up on a piece of badly fitting carpet, or if you slip on a freshly cleaned floor that you were not warned about, or on a carelessly discarded piece of fruit in the supermarket that nobody bothered to clean up, all these are situations where you can frequently get compensation for your injuries.

The workplace is another place where all sorts of accidents happen, and where a claim can be made for them.

The workplace is however a little bit different from most accident scenarios because you might well feel that if you've had an accident in the workplace that it's all your fault really, you should have been more careful. In truth however the law in relation to workplace accidents places a heavy burden on employers to so arrange working practices that accidents are virtually impossible even if people are careless of their own safety. In other words you should have been safe even if you were careless. For this reason it's perfectly possible to make a claim for injuries received in the workplace in circumstances where you might feel that you were entirely responsible for the accident yourself.

Similarly, if you feel that the fault for the accident is with a colleague, who you don't want to get into trouble, that is not necessarily a problem either, because any claim would be against the employer's insurance company, not even against the employer technically, and certainly not against your work colleague. The claim will be along the lines that irrespective of any fault of yourself or your colleague, the injury should not have happened and would not have had happened if the working environment had been organised in a safer manner.