Filing a Claim for Industrial Injuries: An Overview

A huge number of personal injury cases are filed each year in the United Kingdom under the conditional fee arrangement. According to the law, anything that falls under the category of injury caused to one person by another person, group of persons or an entity as a whole can be termed as personal injury. The maximum number of claims cases that are filed deal with accidents at work, closely contested by the road accidents. Among the accidents that occur at work, a huge number of industrial disease claims are filed. A major section of people that work in the United Kingdom are employed in the industries, and being constantly exposed to radiation and harmful chemicals, not to mention dust and smoke, have long term effects on the workers.

The conditional fee settlement was introduced in the United Kingdom with the idea of making the legal system much more approachable and affordable for the people of the country, especially the middle class people of the country. Since this means that the person who is engaging the services of the lawyer under this agreement does not have to pay the fees if the case is not won, this acts completely in favour of the client. This is because the prospect of losing out on one’s fees makes the solicitors work even harder on the case, along with being a lot more transparent about the policies and modus operandi. This definitely works hugely in favour of the client, whose chance of winning automatically becomes higher. Yet another, more psychological factor works behind choosing the legal services of a no win no fee solicitor to represent one’s claim: owing to the very high stakes and the odds stacked against the lawyer, the attorneys working under this agreement hardly ever take up a case that they do not have much faith in. Therefore, once such a lawyer has taken up the case, people breathe more freely, knowing that they have a good chance of winning the compensation.

The rules for filing industrial disease claims vary considerably from the other work accident claims. This is because while the injuries from the other kinds of accidents are almost always immediately visible, the case is not so with industrial diseases. The effects of the harmful radiations and other kinds of substances are slow to show, and it might be quite a while before the person starts experiencing some serious health related problems. For this reason, one can file a compensation claim for some kind of industrial disease up to three years from the date of diagnoses, and a case can be filed even if the person in question is no longer in the employment of the said organisation. There are various kinds of diseases that one may contract due to working in an industry or a factory, depending on the kind of substances he or she was exposed to. While a person might suffer from deafness, chronic asthma, blindness, skin diseases as well as burns and other injuries, instances have also been known of people suffering from problems like a lost limb, which is quite common in people working with industrial machinery, where accidents are common.