Work accident claims

A newer legal term, work injury claims are filed when you are injured on the job and are seeking funds to cover the lost wages, pain, time away from work and the lingering effects of the injury in your life and livelihood. Work injury claims are not personal vendettas against a company, but rather a formal procedure to ensure your workplace is safe and to guarantee you are protected and compensated for any injuries you received due to working conditions.

When filing a work injury compensation claim, consider the following factors carefully:

Evidence of injury

Your first order of business when pursuing a work injury claim is to show evidence that you were, in fact, injured on the job. Your evidence might in the form of paperwork filled out at the time of the injury and signed by others, witnesses to the injury, the presence of medical personnel or an ambulance called to the site of the injury, or documented injuries or complaints in the past leading up to the current injured state.

Without evidence you don't have a case, and your evidence will be the first item sought by a solicitor when you begin to file your claim. Speak to witnesses of the injury and find applicable documents before pursuing your claim. The next step, after finding evidence will be to show that the employer is at fault for the injury, and this is the job of the solicitor.

Solicitor experience

Work injury claims are relatively new in the legal field, but none-the-less, you should have a solicitor with much experience seeking compensation. If you have clear documentation and evidence of the injury, the case should be almost cut and dry to show employer responsibility and then settle on compensation.

The lawyer's job is to show the evidence, show the fault of the employer, and then settle on your behalf. With a great deal of precedence already established in the field, particularly with certain types of injuries, a solicitor with no experience might actually botch a job that should be open and shut.

Type of injury

The type of injury you obtained while working matters a great deal in the proceedings. Cases of injured backs, hernias and injured hands lead the list of complaints. These and other injuries have been brought to court many times before and with the volume of cases processed, compensation levels have been set many times over and are generally easy to apply to new cases. To you, this means that your injured hand should earn you as much as the injured hands that came before.

Cases of common injuries move through the courts more quickly, and personal injury claim cases tend to stagnate when the standard and typically agreed upon level of compensation is tested during the proceedings. You should make a claim regarding any injury you receive at your place of employment, of course, but generally speaking you can expect a more common complaint to be settled before a more unusual one.

Solicitor fees

Finally, pay close attention to the solicitor's fees. Most solicitors are open to work injury claims and don't take any payment upfront with a no win no fee settlement. This means you pay only when you win, but you should get the terms for your winning payment in writing as well as any fine print on the agreement. You should also press for the opposition, in this case your workplace, to pay your solicitor fees earning you the full compensation for your injury.