Personal Injury Update
Many will know that the way Personal Injury claims are handled by Solicitors was changed in April 2013. Well, Personal Injury is changing again! The current situation is that Solicitors will not be able to make a claim for their costs for any claim which settles for under £1,000. This is known as ‘the Small Claims Limit’. This limit will soon rise to £5,000! This means that if you have suffered a relatively minor injury in the last three years from a slip, trip, fall or road traffic collision, and your claim is valued at less than £5,000, you will be asked to pay your costs on a privately paying basis.
£5,000 might not sound like a lot but many minor incidences fall below this limit. A claim for a slip in a supermarket, an injury caused by a faulty item in a shop, and injuries suffered as a result of minor road traffic collisions are all usually valued at less than £5,000. Further, the Government proposes to withdraw a person’s ability to make a claim for simple whiplash. Therefore, if you are involved in a road traffic collision and you have no injuries other than whiplash, you need to make a claim before these reforms are implemented. If these changes are made by the Government, you will only be able to make a claim if you suffer some other injury (e.g. psychological difficulties, broken bones etc) and the whiplash is secondary to those injuries.
Therefore, if you have had an accident in the last three years and have not yet made a claim, contact us and we can advise whether you have a claim worth pursuing. Get your claim in now before Government reforms the law again, contact us today!