The Personal Injury Claims Process

You may have been injured and are looking to see if you could receive personal injury compensation for the accident you weren’t responsible for. As such, you may have queries about making a claim and how exactly the personal injury claims process works.

This guide answers not only those queries but also the important questions below:

How does a No Win No Fee solicitor work?
How long do I have to make a claim?
Can I run out of time to make a claim?
What falls under personal injury?
What does a personal injury claim cover?
How do personal injury claims work?
What are examples of personal injury?

If you prefer, any questions you have about the claims process can be answered by one of our helpful advisors. They are available 24/7, give free legal advice, and can inform you if you’re able to make a claim. Simply contact us through the below.

Call us today.
Write to us using the Live Chat service on the right-hand side of your screen.
Contact us through our website.

Alternatively, please keep reading to find out more about how the personal injury claims process works.

Select a Section

The Definition Of A Personal Injury Claim
How Does The Personal Injury Claims Process Work?
How Many Personal Injury Claims Go To Court?
General Damages Awards In Personal Injury Claims
Special Damages Compensation
Get Help Connecting With No Win No Fee Personal Injury Lawyers
Learn More About The Personal Injury Claims Process

The Definition Of A Personal Injury Claim

You may be wondering, ‘What is a personal injury claim?’ A personal injury claim is a pursuit for compensation due to injuries (whether physical, like nerve damage, or mental) from an incident caused by third-party negligence. There are various ways you can seek compensation for such an incident. Other methods include:

Writing a letter of complaint to the third party.
Using a mediation service to negotiate a settlement.

However, we advise that you get legal advice on how you could go about receiving compensation, in case you’re offered a lot less than you really deserve.

The kind of incidents you could claim for are ones where a third party could be negligent towards you. These include:

Accidents at work
A road traffic accident (RTA)
An accident in a public place

The reason you may be able to claim due to incidents such as the ones above revolves around the fact that the third party that caused these particular incidents has obligations towards your safety. This is often referred to as a duty of care. Negligence will be explained in greater detail later in the article.

You can always represent yourself when making a personal injury claim. However, the personal injury claims process can be difficult to understand without the relevant legal knowledge, so you may prefer to hire a No Win No Fee solicitor.

How Does The Personal Injury Claims Process Work?

Regardless of whether you’re eligible to claim for fracture compensation or a ligament and tendon injury, there is always a personal injury claims process for you and your No Win No Fee lawyers to follow. Please see a general outline of the claims process below.

The claim begins with evidence collection.
Evidence is presented to the defendant.
Further investigations are conducted.
At this point, the defendant may request additional information, such as medical evidence.
Once they have the information and any queries have been answered, the defendant should state their stance on liability.
If they accept liability, the claim can be settled.
If they don’t accept liability, the process continues.
The process could continue to court proceedings. As such, the “litigation process” begins. This means that both the claimant and defendant are required to work within the timeline set by the court.
The steps at this stage involve disclosing all available information, obtaining specialised information if needed, and complying with instructions set by the court.

More detail about the personal injury claims process can be found with the Ministry of Justice. The Pre-Action Protocol explains the measures that should be taken before a claim goes to court. (Most claims are settled out of court.)

If you have any questions or queries about the different stages of a personal injury claim in the UK or how No Win No Fee lawyers in the UK could help you, please call us using the number at the top of this page.

How Many Personal Injury Claims Go To Court?

You may be worried or concerned at the thought of your claim going to court. This is understandable. However, please bear in mind that there’s a very good chance this won’t happen. This is because claims don’t often go to court.

In fact, the industry standard is around 5% and this is even lower in medical negligence cases. This means that, if you’re looking to make a No Win No Fee claim or a personal injury claim under other terms, there could be a 95% chance that your claim will not go to court. There are reasons for this, including:

The costs of litigation
The cost of paying barristers and experts
In some cases, the defendant may not be confident enough that they can actually win the case

General Damages Awards In Personal Injury Claims

You may be wondering, “What is the average payout for a personal injury claim in the UK?” These next two sections will highlight what you could claim and show why it can be a very difficult question to answer. This is because your payout can depend on many different factors.

There are two possible heads of compensation in a personal injury claim. General damages compensate you for the physical and psychological damage caused by the incident. Medical evidence will be used to assess the extent of your injury to help determine how much compensation you could receive.

The Judicial College looks at successful general damages awards concerning both the type and severity of the relevant injury. In doing this, they’ve built recommended compensation brackets so you can get a better understanding of how much you could receive for your respective injury. You can see a table of injuries and the relevant compensation brackets below.

Area of Injury	Severity	Amount of Compensation	Description
Chest	(c) Damage to chest and lung(s)	£29,380 to £51,460	Injuries categorised in this bracket will be ones that cause damage to lung(s) and chest resulting in some continuing disability.
Eye	(h) Minor eye injuries	£3,710 to £8,200	Injuries in this bracket include minor ones, such as exposure to fumes like smoke or being struck in the eye.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder	(b) Moderately severe	£21,730 to £56,180	The effects of this will likely cause serious disability for the foreseeable future. However, there's a better prognosis than severe cases due to responding well to professional help.
Brain	(d) Less severe brain damage	£14,380 to £40,410	In these cases, the injured person will make a decent recovery and be able to take part in a normal social life and work life but not all functions will be restored to their previous level.
Reproductive System: Male	(ii) Impotence which is likely to be permanent	£40,370 to £73,580	This injury most likely causes permanent impotence. In this instance, this bracket would be for a middle-aged man with children.
Bladder	(d) Almost complete recovery	£21,970 to £29,380	Injuries in this bracket have resulted in an almost complete recovery but with some fairly long-term interference with natural function.
Spleen	(a) Loss of spleen	£19,510 to £24,680	Loss of spleen causing a continuous risk of internal infection and disorders due to the immune system damage.
Shoulder	(c) Moderate	£7,410 to £11,980	Injuries include frozen shoulder which limits movement and causes persistent symptoms for around two years.
Wrist	(e) An uncomplicated Colles' fracture.	In the region of £6,970	A simple and uncomplicated Colles' fracture.
Leg	(ii) Simple Fracture of a Femur with No Damage to Articular Surfaces	£8,550 to £13,210	Uncomplicated fracture of a femur with no further complications or damage caused.

If you’d like a more precise compensation estimate, please call us using the phone number at the top of the page. Our advisors are available 24/7, offer free legal advice, and provide a reliable compensation estimate over the phone in just minutes.

Special Damages Compensation

Establishing what you can and can’t claim for is important in the personal injury claims process. With that in mind, the second potential head of claim is special damages. This relates to the financial losses caused by the injury. As such, you could claim things like:

Loss of earnings
Loss of future earnings
Travel costs
Recreational events that you can no longer attend
Prescription/medicines

However, to potentially receive special damages compensation, you would need evidence to prove the value of the financial losses. Evidence you could need includes:

Bank statements
Invoices
Receipts

If you don’t provide the relevant evidence, you won’t be able to claim for special damages. Our advisors can help you understand what you could claim for your particular case.

Get Help Connecting With No Win No Fee Personal Injury Lawyers

To be able to make a successful claim, you need to establish third-party negligence. There are three key aspects to this. They are:

That the third party had a duty of care towards you.
That they breached this duty of care.
And it was this breach of duty that led to you suffering an injury.

Being able to prove all three aspects is critical to the personal injury claims process, to the extent where, if you’re unable to, you could, unfortunately, not be able to claim. However, a solicitor could help you to do this.

Another key aspect to this is making sure that you claim within the personal injury claims time limit. This will be one of the first things personal injury solicitors will check. This is because you need to claim either within three years from the incident or three years from the date you discovered the injury was caused by negligence.

You can suffer an internal injury caused by, for example, an industrial disease which means that you won’t discover the injury until it becomes a noticeable health risk.

These claim time limits are established in the Limitation Act 1980. As such, if you attempt to claim when the incident occurred outside of the criteria listed above, it could be unable to go ahead. However, there are exceptions to these limitations, so why not get in touch to find out what time limit you may need to adhere to?

How do No Win No Fee claims work?

You could potentially make a No Win No Fee compensation claim by using our panel of solicitors. You could, however, be wondering, “What does a No Win No Fee agreement” mean? It’s often referred to as a Conditional Fee Agreement.

The advantages of No Win No Fee are:

Your solicitor will not request you pay legal fees, either upfront or during the personal injury claims process.
Instead, they will take a small, legally capped portion of your compensation as payment once your claim has been successful.
Your personal injury solicitor will also not take legal fees from you if your claim is unsuccessful.

Our panel of No Win No Fee personal injury solicitors could get you thousands of pounds in compensation. Please contact our advisors for free legal advice using the details below to see if you’re eligible to claim. They can help you with any queries you have, including if you want to know more about the personal injury claims process.

Call us using the tab at the top of the page.
Use our Live Chat on the right-hand side of your screen.
Contact us via our website.

Learn More About The Personal Injury Claims Process

For more information about claiming and the circumstances surrounding it, use the links below.

To learn more about claiming compensation from local councils, view this Government webpage.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) provides UK-based work-related injury statistics.

Broken a bone? If so, and you want more information about how to treat it, visit the NHS website.

Why not check out more of our personal injury claims guides below:

Thank you for reading our guide to the personal injury claims process.

Written by DUR

Published by VIC