Is demanding a personal injury claim, such as a work accident claim, easy or hard?

If you listen to law group advertisers, then the answer is “Yes, incredibly so.” If, however, you listen to bitter claimants, then the answer is “No, it’s impossible.” The right answer, and one which I can validate with my own experience is somewhere in between these two extremes.

I was involved in a car crash a few months ago while driving out of London one night. Some teenagers, who later turned out to be drunk drivers, lost control of their green van and plummeted it straight at the back of my SUV. Although I received no injury worse than a minor whiplash, I still got in touch with a car accident lawyer and demanded compensation. I was not in want of money for medication or anything. I just wanted to teach these immature and irresponsible teenagers some lesson.

My claim did not last for a long while at all. In fact, after only a few weeks, my lawyer was able to persuade those teenagers to compensate me immediately because they could be made to pay me more if ever the case gets blown into a full-court dispute. Their parents paid off my claim, but I’m sure those kids won’t be driving anytime soon.

What I discovered after claiming compensation, nevertheless, was that it can be a quick and easy process, provided that you are really in the right. My lawyer was practically smacking his lips when I told him the details of my case. I assume it was because he knew that what was in front of him was easy pickings. Furthermore, lawyers are busy people too. It is not in their interest to prolong a case, whether it be a whiplash injury case like mine or a work accident claim like yours, because the more time they spend languishing in one case, then the more time they are wasting in waiving the chance to embrace a new case with its generous acceptance fee. I can only shrug when people consistently berate lawyers for their idleness or ineptitude. It is not really up to them whether or not their cases get finished quickly or not. It is up to the facts of the case itself.

Some people just don’t know how to be decent.

Last week my friends and I were having an innocent ride down London. But before we could even start our conversation, some bozo who had been driving an SUV as slowly as a tractor stopped moving unexpectedly in the middle of the road, causing us to hit her vehicle lightly. Now, to make matters worse, instead of asking for our apology, she even had the audacity to threaten filing a No Win No Fee car accident claim against me and my friends! Said we gave her whooplash or something. And that she would teach us all a lesson.

We snickered, “We don’t know about you granny, but it looks as if you’re the one who needs a lesson—a driving lesson, that is!” And we laughed ourselves to death.

We were ready to quit (our green van wasn’t damaged or anything), when we saw the woman taking down our car’s plate number. We didn’t think much about it at the time. In fact, we left the woman driving to some police station, while we went on to enjoy ourselves at my girlfriend’s party. It was a good day.

Which quickly turned into a bad one. A few hours after arriving at my girlfriend’s house, my parents called me up and told me to go home. When I did get home, after sobering myself up a little (it’s not a party unless you get some booze on, right?), I discovered to my horror that the little cat actually was not bluffing and did go on to file a No Win No Fee car accident claim! And not only that, she was demanding no less than 10,000 pounds for her injury! “The nerve of that dwarf,” I said. I argued that even if we did injure her, we should not be asked for that much amount, for her injury was merely a light one and her car was not badly damaged at all. Nevertheless, she argued, when my parents did get to talk to her, that the bulk of the amount was meant to compensate not her physical injuries, but her “emotional” and “psychological” ones.

“What the—,” I said, “Surely, this must be a joke! We live in Great Britain, for Christ’s sake. We don’t tolerate this kind of drama here. We’re not Members of Parliament! This woman is not the Queen! This isn’t some Narnia!”

But the dwarf got her wish. For some reason my parents and my friends’ parents paid her in full. Now, we’re all grounded for a year. So much for a happy spring break.

That stereotypes are usually wrong, many people can prove easily by themselves. If they can think of any kind of stereotype in mind and compare what it says about certain people and oppose to that image the actual attitude or appearance of those people in real life, then they will see that not only has their mental conception been wrong all along, but also that it is unfair and often crude. This idea is what impressed me the most when I demanded a workplace injury claim last week.

For reasons I will not belabor on here, my employer hired a bungler to work. It would not have mattered so much if the nature of our job was merely a desk one or a classroom based one. It is, however, a dangerous one, for we work at a construction site. My job specifically is to oversee the logistics of the materials we use in building, such as whether or not the cement is mixed properly and on time and whether or not the equipment we are using can still bear the brunt of the tasks we use them for. Now, this bungler that my employer hired was in charge of transferring different construction materials and, naturally enough, was placed under my authority. The problem began when I ordered him to carry some sacks of gravel to the other side of the room. Assuming that he already knew how to convey heavy materials properly, and because my employer did not inform me that this man was as yet untrained to do such a job, I did not pay him much attention. I should have known better, for he lifted the sack carelessly and ended up releasing all of its contents down crashing on me.

Since I incurred serious bruises and a sprained ankle from this horrible accident, I immediately called up a workplace injury claim lawyer and filed a case. And in doing so, a realization dawned upon me. My lawyer, and as I further on came to know, other lawyers too, are actually nice. They are not at all what I expected them to be. The stereotype that dominated my mind, and I think the public mind as well, was that lawyers were avaricious, deceitful egoists. Nothing could be more wrong, or at least according to my experience. They are actually childlike and sincere people who can commiserate with the pain and suffering that their clients feel. All in all, my claim ended well because my employer decided to settle it out of court. I am all right now, and perhaps what expedited my recovery the most was that the bungler who injured me was fired the day after his injurious, stupid mistake.

Yes, I said it. Accidents are sometimes fun.

But before you go all Jesus-Christ-she-is-such-an-insensitive jerk up on me, you should know that my father is a pastor. The Holy Spirit, in his modest words, is in my genes. I don’t really care where exactly. Maybe it’s there somewhere on the back of my neck because I can’t see it. Besides, I’ve been prayed over so many times, I can hear my father’s voice anywhere I go. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I’ll leave it up to you. My point is that if even God’s representative can’t whip me up into a responsible lady, then there’s really not much hope for anybody else to do it.

Now, that’s me. I’m not afraid of anyone. In fact, too many people are afraid of too many people. Why can’t we just admit that we don’t like who we don’t like? Why be so presumptuous? For example, why can’t we just admit that there are certain people who, when they get into accidents, can’t really make us feel any worse, and on the contrary, can even make our day? But, say you, it’s not religious. Or worse, as we British call it, it’s not “respectable.” As if respectability was more valuable than the truth! Blame my genes for infatuating me with words like “truth,” “justice,” or “honesty.” But, again, you’d only be blaming the Holy Spirit.

One funny accident that I don’t feel bad at all occurred when I was at work. If things didn’t end up as messy as it did, with a No Win No Fee compensation claim flung about by my supervisor, I’m sure everybody else would have seen the humor of it. Well, what happened was that my supervisor, who happened to be too familiar with his female employees, once embraced one of them for too long. The poor girl, who was probably new, did not know what to do. Usually, all of us would signal to the other women in the room to distract the guy in order to free whoever he was harassing. However, this new girl, out of sync with the rest of us, put matters into her own hands and pushed the supervisor with a strength we thought was impossible for her to muster. Truly, nothing energizes women more than disgust. Our bald supervisor fell onto the floor and broke his hip. The girl he had been so affectionate with a while ago, he suddenly degenerated into a “disrespectful hussy.” She was, again, demanded a No Win No Fee compensation claim but thank God, the suit was rejected. Nevertheless, she was then fired soon after.

Now, tell me: is it wrong to feel happy, even vindictive, by seeing how this pervert got his just desserts both by getting injured and losing his case? I think not. Absolutely not. How about you? The girl, by the way, found work three weeks later. I know because she’s currently employed by my sister.

Please hear me out.

Recently, my friends and my wife have told me that my concern for the safety of my children has passed the threshold of “normalcy.” Apparently, I have become too paranoid. For instance, I prohibit my children from playing on the street. But this was only because one of my daughters almost got hit by an onrushing van before. Is it my fault if I wanted to keep my child healthy? Of course, I did scold her quite harshly afterwards, but that’s beside the point. Another time, my son stayed longer than usual at school. Now, I know middle school students, since they are just starting out their teenage years, have to be dealt with patiently, but how was I to know that he was merely working overtime to polish a class presentation and did not faint, or worse, get attacked by a bully? The security in his school is not at all dysfunctional (I’ve taken care to find him a good school, thank you!), but even then, you never know…

I love my children so much that I don’t know what I could do if any of them gets hurt. But aside from that, I would never, if given the chance, get myself involved in another lawsuit. I’ve only recently settled a No Win No Fee UK claim at work. I admit I was at fault, so I finished the matter up quickly. But the whole experience has been traumatic. Receiving a demand letter, calling up my own lawyer, negotiating with the defendant, and the worst of all, having to shell out my own money (in this economy!) without having any power to disobey the law (I’ve no intentions in going back to rehab), well, I don’t really know how to describe how I feel. Lawsuits, whether No Win No Fee UK claims or whatever, don’t interest me at all, thank you. And if I could avoid having to do with any lawsuit at all by ensuring that my children are always safe—no more demanding anything from anybody, even if I or my children were the one to be compensated—then I could honestly say I’m living a happy life. So that’s that.

My question is this: have I been overreacting? Am I, to use my wife’s words, “sacrificing my children’s happiness for my own”? Please don’t be afraid to share your thoughts.