Serious Injury Solicitors

What is a serious injury claim?

A serious injury is a catastrophic injury that can have a significant, life-changing and/or long-term impact on an individual’s life and that of their family.

Serious injuries include amputations, serious medical injuries, burns, brain and spinal cord injuries and loss of sight or hearing.

These can be incurred as a result of a road traffic accident, an accident at work, or through medical negligence. As every serious injury case is unique, it is important to speak to one of our friendly team, who will be able to establish quickly if you have a case and will advise on how we can support you.

If you suffer serious injury because of the negligence of another person or organisation, we will work with you in your claim for compensation for your injury. This is called general damages.

You may also be eligible for compensation for financial losses, known as special damages, and we will advise you on this. Often determined by expert evidence, there are many elements that are taken into account when assessing your entitlement to compensation.

These special damages can include funding for specialist equipment, mobility aids, modifications, specialist treatment and care.

What is the role of a serious injury solicitor?

Our serious injury solicitors are advocates for you during the toughest time in your life. Everyone’s goals and objectives will be different in the aftermath of injury. We’ll take the time to truly understand your needs and work to resolve your case in the best possible way.

Our team will meet with you face to face and understand more about what has happened and the impact of the accident on you and your family.   We will notify the organisation responsible for providing compensation, ordinarily an insurance company.

But compensation is just one way serious injury solicitors help in the wake of a life-changing injury. In most cases it will be appropriate for the solicitor to facilitate rehabilitation to support you on the road to recovery. We have relationships with the best rehabilitation providers in the area and can direct you to the one that is best equipped to assist with your very individual circumstances.

We are also responsible for seeking interim payments to help ease the financial burden that can often occur in the immediate aftermath of an injury. These payments can be crucial to help keep you afloat in those early days and weeks and, crucially, to ease stress at a time when focussing on recovery should be central.

We will also make an immediate start on collating evidence of your losses and begin the process of instructing medical experts to assess and report on the injuries sustained with a view to building the legal case.

Our lawyers will draw on their rich experience to start assessing the value of your claim and will fight for the best outcome by negotiating the highest settlement possible.

Often we are able to achieve a good result for our clients quickly and effectively through negotiation but, when absolutely necessary, we can prepare your case and take it to court.

How our solicitors can help

There are few law firms that can offer you the level of experience that we can. We have helped countless people rebuild their lives following serious injury, including brain injury, spinal injury, amputations, serious orthopaedic injury, disease and occupational illness, chronic pain and severe psychological injuries.

You could not be in safer hands. We are:

• One of three law firms selected by The Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham to support patients at the hospital as part of the 4 Trauma 4 Patients support service
• One of three firms selected by the University Hospital of Coventry and Warwickshire operated by Cardinal Management to support patients as part of the Major Trauma Signposting project
• One of three firms selected by the Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital operated by Cardinal Management to support patients as part of the Major Trauma Signposting project
• Accredited members of Headway’s Head Injury Solicitors Directory
• Spinal Injuries Association trusted legal partner for the West Midlands
• Members of:
  • The Motor Accident Solicitors Society
  • Association of Personal Injury Lawyers
  • Birmingham Law Society
• Approved Law Society Personal Injury Panel
• Recognised in Chambers and Partners Directory
• Recommended by the Legal 500 as leading personal injury lawyers.
• Accredited members of Headway’s Head Injury Solicitors Directory
• Listed in the Spinal Injury Association Solicitors Directory of Personal Injury Solicitors
• Members of the Motor Accident Solicitors Society
• Association of Personal Injury Lawyers
• Birmingham Law Society
• Law Society Personal Injury Panel
• Recognised in Chambers and Partners Directory
• Recommended by the Legal 500 as leading personal injury lawyers.

We are fully committed to achieving the best outcome for you and your family and have an impressive track-record of getting results.

As we are a broad-based practice that offers holistic support, we can work with our colleagues in other legal disciplines to support your case, if needed. It means you will benefit from a seamless, one-team approach.

This is a highly sensitive and emotive area of law and we understand how stressful claims such as this can be for clients and their families.

We pride ourselves on offering a highly personalised service to every client and we remain focused on achieving the best outcome that will enable the individual concerned to get the support, care and financial assistance they need.

How we will deal with your claim 

Claims have to begin within three years of the injury, although a court can extend this, depending on the case.  One major exception is if a case involves a child – the limitation period starts on their 18^th birthday.

There are several specific processes that must be completed as part of any serious injury claim:

• Decide who was responsible – it could be where you work, another organisation or even a manufacturer of a piece of equipment.
• Collate evidence to support your claim, including dashcam and CCTV footage, witness statements and photographs.
• Assess your injuries or illness – we will likely need to gather medical evidence from your GP or hospital, if you received treatment there, as well as further expert medical assessment and photographs to prove the extent of any injury.
• Arrange medical care or rehabilitation – we may be able to arrange access to private care and arrange interim funds to help pay for it, if the NHS cannot provide this in a timely way.
• Work out compensation – to do this, we will assess:
  • The extent of your injuries, pain and suffering
  • The cost of medical treatments, therapies, or rehabilitation
  • Your travel costs to medical appointments associated with the case
  • If you have lost income or you cannot carry out the job you had before
  • Any equipment, such as wheelchairs, prosthetics, or an accessible car, that you have had to buy
  • Any home adaptations you have made or the cost of moving to an accessible property
  • If you have incurred care costs
  • If you have incurred damage to property, such as car, bicycle, clothes etc.

The compensation calculator also takes into account any losses you may face in the future.

• Reach a settlement – once we come to a figure that we deem appropriate, we to try to reach a settlement with the person or organisation you are making a claim against. It is common for several offers and counter offers to be made before the final amount is agreed. You may decide to reject the offer. If this is the case, it can go to court but we will advise on this.
• Payment – your compensation is usually a lump sum payment, minus any interim payments, if you received any. If the compensation covers long-term costs – or is paid into a trust (see below), the court could order monthly or yearly instalments.
• Any other support – working with our colleagues within Higgs to see what other specialist support we can provide, if our clients require it. This could be for a house move, employment dispute, setting up a trust or changing your will.

No win no fee claims

When you first contact us, we will determine if you have any existing legal expenses cover that you can use. If you do not have cover, we may be able to offer a no win, no fee arrangement. This means if your claim is unsuccessful, you pay nothing.  It’s completely risk-free and there are no hidden charges.

Personal injury trusts

We are specialists in setting up personal injury trusts, which protect your entitlement to means-tested benefits. When the funds are paid into a trust the amount held in that trust is ignored for the assessment of benefit entitlement.

The trust must be managed by two or more trustees (and you, as claimant, could be one of these) or a trust corporation.

The trustees make decisions together about how the funds, which are there for everyday living expenses, are managed.

A personal injury trust should be set up before you receive the compensation funds because it will mean there will be no loss of benefits or care funding entitlement.

This is particularly important because there is a 52-week grace period during which time any compensation you receive does not count towards means-tested benefits or counted as part of any financial assessment for care fees. After this time, any compensation funds not in a personal injury trust will be included in an assessment.

Access to rehabilitation and medical care

Our in-house rehabilitation and support co-ordinators are here to help. They have a background in health and social care and their job is to:

• identify the support you need and help you access it
• help co-ordinate your discharge from hospital and get you home safely
• access care from the local authority or Integrated Care Board
• collaborate and work with the treating therapists
• liaise with a case manager
• provide emotional support
• support your family.

It’s no secret that the NHS is under pressure and waiting lists are lengthy. Our specialist service means many of our clients can access some therapies quicker than they would under the NHS, enabling them to rebuild their lives and meet their goals sooner.

We’ll work with medical experts, support groups and care providers to ensure you receive the rehabilitation you need and can help you to access a range of specialist rehabilitation support and medical treatment privately. We will often do this by liaising with the proposed compensator to try to agree either direct funding or an interim payment. If the treatment costs are not paid directly by the compensator, they are often included as part of your claim.

To help you achieve the best outcome in your claim, we work with some of the best case managers and rehabilitation providers in the country.