You can make a personal injury claim for practically any accident. Your eligibility to do so however is a different matter entirely.
In order to be eligible to make a claim, your Date of Limitation must be within the last three years. The Date of Limitation is the date your injuries became clear – most people’s Date is within a day or a week of their accident.
In addition to this, you can only make a personal injury claim if you were not to blame or were only partly to blame for your accident. You can still make a claim if the accident was your fault, however the chances of claim success are low and a claims helpline for accidents would likely advise you not to make a claim, if this were the case.
If you tick all of these boxes, then you can make a claim for compensation.
The different types of accident claim
The types of accident you can claim for are endless. The most commonly claimed for accidents are road traffic accidents, slips, trips and falls, food poisoning and allergy accidents and industrial accidents. In fact, road traffic accidents account for over half of all accident claims while slips, trip and falls account for over a third of all accidents in the workplace. The rarest accidents are air-related accidents like those on airplanes. In fact according to the latest data, there is only a 0.00001% chance that your plane will crash. If you have been injured during travel on an airline, though, you can make a claim.
Making a claim for accidents on domestic flights is straightforward, it is when you are injured on an international flight that things get tricky. If you were injured on an airline and you booked a package holiday, then the tour operator is liable for any accidents or injuries during the flight. However if you were not flying as part of a package holiday, you can only make a claim against the airline using international law, or the Montreal Convention.
The vast majority of accident claims happen on UK soil however. The most common injury claimed for is whiplash, which is usually caused by a road traffic accident. However this injury has also been known to be caused on roller coasters. Whiplash is a debilitating injury and the recovery period can be months and sometimes years. Insurers set aside millions of pounds every year to pay compensation to the victims of whiplash. If you have sustained such an injury, then you should contact a solicitor to find out more about the claims process and to get an estimate of how much money you could make a claim for.