The firm I worked with was a regional London-based firm with another small office elsewhere in the UK specialising in no win no fee compensation claims.
The firm had many paralegals because personal injury claims are not very hard to process and a few solicitors and partners who ran the firm and dealt with more complicated procedures. I worked with a group of paralegals who gave me many tasks and which I found absolutely fascinating.
In most cases a similar procedure is followed. The injured party contacts the solicitor firm and explains the accident. Then the evidence is gathered like notes from going to A&E, medical records, pictures of scars, any correspondence with your boss regarding your injury and basically everything that is relevant to your accident. Then the solicitors issue a claim and notify your boss / local authorities / person responsible for your accident and they have time to respond to the claim and issue the response. This litigation proceeds till an agreement is made.
Most of the time, the two parties come to a satisfactory conclusion. Several factors are taken into account when calculating the compensation. First of all, the requested compensation sum will be equivalent or similar to the sum that other injured parties won on previous occasions (precedents). Second of all, there are various measurements taken into account like the gravity of the disability caused. For example, if the compensation for a lost eye is say GBP 5’000, then if somebody who was already blind in one eye, would ask for a lot more than the GBP 5’000 as the loss of the vision in his only working eye caused him total blindness. The inability to work and medical expenses due to the accident are also taken into account and are usually compensated which obviously varies from person to person, from accident to accident.
Of course, the main reason why the negotiations come to a swift agreement is that usually the employer has an insurance cover for these kinds of problems and it will not be him paying the injured party the compensation. So techinically, it is not his money he is worried about. But the injured party is not a winner by default just because the insurance company is there. Sometimes the negligence does not actually fall on the employer and was the injured person’s fault; it is not in the interest of an employer to lose the claim, because his insurance premium will certainly rise and of course it is not good for his reputation. The accident has two sides to every story and that’s why the solicitors are there to negotiate the deal that’s more favourable to the party they are representing.
My routine every day was quite similar. I worked with a bunch of paralegals and my duties included calling the injured party and clarifying the story of the accident. A large amount of claimants are foreigners who are working in the construction industry and sometimes they find it hard to explain the situation clearly from the first time. It is of course essential for the solicitors to understand exactly how the accident happened so that when they enter into negotiations they will not pitfall into the obscurity of the story.
So I called, the clients, I also called witnesses and asked to either write a witness statement or made further clarification on what they wrote in their witness statements already because they can play a very important role. I also called various other organizations to speed up the negotiation process for example when we haven’t received an important letter or to chase up some lost documents. I did some administrative work as well which included photocopying and sorting out files into relevant folders. Standard! I also had plenty of opportunities to read some interesting cases and discuss with my colleagues the intricacies of various situations. For example, a gentleman who hastily crosses the street - not at traffic lights - in the early hours of the morning when it is dark and raining, he gets run over by the car driver who was not exceeding the speed limit – does he have a chance of recovering full costs? Etc.
Sometimes, when the two parties cannot come to an agreement, solicitors can in the first instance ask the court to advise them. The court clerks will look at the claim and from their experience will advise the firm whether they have a good chance of winning the case or not. This is a very easy step and a really good one, because they are drawing on the court’s wealthy expertise and if they advise them negatively, they will not be wasting the client’s time and money in pursuing this case in court. I actually drafted one of those letters which was pretty exciting!
Although I really enjoyed this work experience tremendously because I had a chance to do so many things and get this literally ‘hands-on’ experience, I don’t think personal injury is for me. It can be an exceptionally interesting area of law and of course, personal injury lawyers are essential to help the ducklings in distress. But as I explained, I can see how routinely it can get after a while and I would probably be interested in pursuing a career in an area where there is a variety of work. Although, at another point in life, I met a barrister who specialized in personal injury claims and he was getting the kicks out of it. So it is like most things - a unique preference.
xxX Savanna Xxx
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