Is there a compensation culture?
Lil_M
Posts: 2,105 Forum Member
✭✭✭
I was talking to a friend of mine, and he told me there are many law firms that solely concentrates on personal injury such as road traffic accidents, slips, etc...
I was surprised as I thought law firms would concentrate on other areas such as family, employment, finance, business etc ... and solely one area
Now that I think about it, it is not surprising given the number of adverts on daytime telly. Plus, I reckon most people can sort dispute between themselves without needing to go to some lawyer in an event of a minor accident. Half the time,you could pay for repairs or something.
I was surprised as I thought law firms would concentrate on other areas such as family, employment, finance, business etc ... and solely one area
Now that I think about it, it is not surprising given the number of adverts on daytime telly. Plus, I reckon most people can sort dispute between themselves without needing to go to some lawyer in an event of a minor accident. Half the time,you could pay for repairs or something.
0
Comments
Saul is homeland. I think you mean Suits
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Call_Saul
You miss the point perhaps .People arent interested in sorting it out reasonably - they're interested in easy money and possibly quite a lot of it . Runs perfectly in sync with the celeb culture a lot of people seem obsessed with ...again the perception of easy money ...innit .
I can understand in some cases but if you slip on a leaf why sue the council where the tree is, if your child falls over in the playground why think of suing the council because the ground was hard and he cut himself.
There are a few here
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1268723/Ridiculous-compensation-culture-claims-pay-outs-burden-tourist-attractions.html
Some of the more incredible claims include a woman who fell into a moat while trespassing at Carlisle Castle at 2am
The V&A also had to pay £400 to a man who put his thumb in hot soup in the museum's restaurant. The man had found the food counter unattended and helped himself to the soup, scalding himself in the process.
http://www.virginmedia.com/money/features/strangest-compensation-claims.php?ssid=1
As we saw recently with the sacked eight-year-old paperboy suing his boss for 'lost income and hurt feelings,' we truly live in a compensation culture
Boiled groin
In 1994, a 79-year-old woman who spilt a McDonalds coffee over her groin area was awarded nearly $3 million damages by a New Mexico jury.
She was sitting in a moving car at the time!
In December 1998, a teacher of twenty years visited the canteen for lunch and slipped on a chip.
Suffering knee ligament damage, the Judge apparently said that it would have been difficult to spot the chip because of the colour and pattern of the tiled flooring. He then awarded her £55,000
A British office worker was awarded more than £50,000 compensation for job-related stress because of a depression brought on, she alleged, by being 'promoted against her will.
Children's toilets in junior schools are meant for little bodies.
When one teacher was caught short and needed to use one for a number two, he fell off, dislocated his hip and won £14,000 compensation
A trespassing teenager fell through a roof on private property and received £567,000 compensation when his parents sued for his serious head injuries attributable, they claimed, to a lack of secure fencing
A heroin addict jailbird was awarded almost £5,000 compensation in an out-of-court settlement for cutting his thumb when dismantling his prison bed frame.
£100,000 was awarded to a teacher tricked into giving an elderly colleague a chocolate willy in 1998. The compensation claim was awarded because of the extreme distress caused.
Step under any of the capital's bridges and you'll see a myriad of bird life. One London artist did just that but got more than she bargained for when she slipped on some fresh pigeon poop under Battersea Bridge.
The result, £20,000 compensation
And undoubtedly no win-no fee solicitors can behave badly. There are not only solicitors that only deal with personal liability cases, there are other, sharkier ones, who buy these cases up in bulk from other solicitors, and pursue them aggressively. It was one of these lovely firms that tried to claim £5000 compensation and £85,000 legal costs from me, for a tenant who had poured drain cleaner over her hand. The £85,000 was for a few letters and a phone call, as far as I can tell; and of course I had to pay the full amount for my own solicitor and barrister, since there is no no win-no fee for defendents. Mercifully it looks as if their own insurers will pull the plug, since otherwise I would be in debt for the rest of my life, for an incident I didn't even know about until two years after it happened.
And they've pinned it on Health and Safety.
Health and Safety often gets a bad rap, but really its mostly a reaction to this culture of compensation.
Not a great surprise if you think about it .Passing the Bar exams is a piece of piss(95% pass) - so its bound to attract shady characters with far more interest in cash than the upholding of the law per se - QED.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1268723/Ridiculous-compensation-culture-claims-pay-outs-burden-tourist-attractions.html. This has been repeated on site after site because it is so hilar...it even includes the word 'toilet'. But the truth is that the case is confidential; none of these media reports knows what happened (other than that the compensation was not £14,000; how odd that the Mail got the only detail that WAS made public wrong; it was £12,958 .)
And the tabloids are terribly prone to report threats to sue as if they were listed court cases, and court cases as if they were court decisions. Every time you see a Mail or Express report that 'a prisoner is sueing because he stabbed himself trying to hide a blade' or whatever, you know you reading nonsense.
This is the most widely reported case of all, and nearly always wrongly. No one knows the actual terms of the settlement, because it was confidential. Macdonalds had sold coffee at a much higher temperature than comparable food and drink takeaway firms, and said in their defence that they did not sell it for people to drink in their cars. The prosecution did not accept this, and also pointed that that they had been involved in 700 separate legal cases involving burns. This one was extremely severe; the damages in the initial case were set high because the jury were very shocked by the seriousness of her burns. http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm
I even googled some law firms, page after page after page of thousands of thousands of law firms. This area is pretty massive sounds of it. It is a compensation culture run amok. It is sad people value money over lives. I bet there are people who purposely fall, trip or cause road traffic accidents to get money.
Either it is my bad or the poster could have waited till 2015 to post that. Anyhow, I am thankful for the alert, I look forward to watching it.
Don't you get the phone calls from them?
I personally do not. My mum does get them a lot. She told them to pissoff.
If only that worked.
They gave up eventually and not received any calls. She had calls from India and even she was like wtf
Me too.
Why do people even bother answering the phone if they are just going to abuse the caller?
Screen the calls with caller display or use an answer machine and keep your blood-pressure down.
They'll probably be traumatised and unable to work again. Should be good for a few quid :-D