How long does it take?
Our goal is to maximise compensation: the time it takes depends upon the severity of your injury and the time you need to recover. Whilst you are making progress we will do everything we can to obtain interim payments to help you pay your bills and to obtain the services you need.
No two claims are ever exactly alike, and what happens in practice depends upon the expertise of your solicitor, what your financial needs are, the approach taken by the insurance company and many other factors.
To give you an idea, we have set out on the slides below the stages that you might see in a well managed claim as it progresses from beginning to end...
Step 1: Who is responsible for your injuries?
This is something that we would want to work out early on, as soon as possible. We need to be able to prove liability (fault), so that you can recover compensation for your head injuries.
This may include:
- obtaining evidence about how your injury happened - speaking with the police or other authorities, talking to witnesses, visiting the scene of the incident etc, all depending upon what happened; in the case of a road traffic accident this may involve a referral to our collision investigation service.
- making contact with anyone involved in the accident who may be to blame, and talking to their insurance company or representatives to try and persuade them to accept that your injury was their fault
Sometimes this might all be disputed in which case we might need to move you on a few steps to start a case in court. However, if we can sort out "liability" for you, you should be able to access interim payments to help pay for support or compensate you for reasonable expenses or loss of earnings.
Step 2: Arrange for rehabilitation and support
At an early stage we need to look to helping you with interim payments to assist you financially and to fund extra rehabilitation for you. It is important that you have access to early head injury rehabilitation which is right for you, and helps to achieve some key goals which you want to work to with your rehabilitation team.
Rehabilitation is an ongoing process but it starts at an early stage and can go on for a long time. The aim is to get you to the best achievable state of health and wellbeing and to maximise your chances of returning to your chosen lifestyle and leading a fulfilling life. Until your rehabilitation is complete it might be too soon to assess your compensation claim properly.
Rehabilitation might include us:
- Talking to anyone involved in your medical treatment and support
- Providing you and your family with information and guidance about the options
- Referring you to a specialist head or brain injury rehabilitation service if you do not already benefit from this
- Arranging for extra therapy, such as physiotherapy, to fill in any "gaps".
We will also look to introduce extra support for you such as a specialist brain injury case manager.
Step 3: Assess the extent of your head or brain injury
We will:
- Identify the full extent of your injuries
- Obtain your medical records
- Arrange for assessments of your injuries by head injury experts who will then write reports for you
- Ask the specialists how long it may take for you to make progress
- Get an opinion from the head injury specialists about the long term outlook for you.
The insurance company or health trust dealing with your claim may also wish to obtain their own medical reports to assess your injuries.
Looking in detail at the effect of head injuries needs to be done carefully. It is always helpful for us to be able to talk with family members, friends and work colleagues for their thoughts on how the injury has affected you, and give this information to the head injury experts. We may arrange for witness statements from them.
Sometimes it helps to keep a diary of your recovery, which others could add to, the milestones in your recovery and the help that you are receiving.
Step 4: Review your progress and ensure that your support needs are fully met
Once you have progressed with your rehabilitation, we will need to review how you have got on.
This will involve asking some of the medical specialists who might have seen you before you during your rehab to comment on the progress that you have made.
It may also involve you seeing medical or other experts who have been asked to wait until you complete your rehabilitation before even starting their assessment of you. This will help the experts to "fine tune" their recommendations for your long term outlook and help them to form their opinion on issues such as you returning to work and what support you might need in the future.
For example, as you improve it may become possible to assess your long term work prospects and your need for an ongoing support programme.
Until the experts feel they can make a final firm prognosis, we finalise the next step in your claim.
Step 5: Calculating the claim for compensation
Your claim for compensation might be made up of several different parts, depending upon your injuries. Until you have reached a point where your rehabilitation is fairly steady, it might be too early to try and calculate precisely what can be claimed in financial terms.
There are lots of different elements that could make up an award of compensation including:
- Damages for your injury
- Damages for any loss of earnings
- Any reduction in your future working ability
- Damages for care, whether provided by your family or a professional carer, both past and projected into the future
- Other expenses such as case management fees, both past and projected into the future.
We work towards creating a document called a "Schedule of Loss" which calculates precisely for the insurance company what you are claiming for each area of your claim. We also gather together all the evidence that supports this, such as documents, expert reports and witness statements.
Step 6: Settlement or Court Proceedings?
Sometimes it is possible to reach an agreement with the insurance company to pay compensation without having to start a Court claim.
However, we might need to start a Court Claim for you somewhere along the way. This might be because we are unable to agree with a settlement with the insurance company. The Court can supervise the process and ensure that there is a suitable timetable is agreed and kept to.
To start a Court claim, we prepare various documents for the Court to start or "issue" the claim and then send the Court papers usually to the Defendants solicitors.
If, after the court claim is started, we still cannot agree on the compensation that should be paid, the Court will fix a date to have a final hearing. A Judge will then decide what amount should be paid in settlement of the claim, having heard the witnesses and medical experts.
Step 7: When it's all over
A claim will usually come to an end either when a Judge has ordered what amount should be paid or because we have been able to agree the amount with the insurance company by negotiating with them.
At that stage, we need to agree exactly how your damages will be paid. Often, damages are paid as a single lump sum. Some sums may be paid upfront to help fund rehabilitation and other expenses as the claim goes along – these are known as interim payments. Any interim payments will be deducted from the final settlement, as they have already been received.
Sometimes the Court may order that insurance companies should pay part of the settlement up as regular "Periodical Payments", usually a sum of money paid annually or monthly, rather than a big lump sum. This may happen if you are claiming for a long term care package which you may have to pay for annually for a long period of time.
The medical experts may also have to reach a decision about whether your head injury leaves you incapable of dealing with your own finances. This affects the way in which the compensation is paid and may involve a specialist part of the Court known as the Court of Protection.
We are able to offer the services of our financial planning, trust and court of protection teams.