You might be surprised to learn that you can claim compensation for an office injury or accident. Many office accidents go unreported, never mind compensation being claimed for them, just because office employees feel that if they suffered an injury in an environment traditionally considered about the safest you can work in, it must be their fault. It rarely is the accident victims’ fault and if you are pretty darned sure your accident was not your fault you have already started to establish the grounds on which a claim for compensation can be brought.
At this stage it is usually wise to consider appointing a specialist workplace injury solicitor, for although you might feel very strongly that you accident wasn’t your fault, that has to be able to be clearly demonstrated using information collected about your accident and workplace, including witness statements and any photographic evidence. It also has to be determined who was to blame for your accident. A specialist lawyer, steeped in health and safety law and vastly experienced in dealing with workplace compensation claims will know who to speak to and where to find the necessary evidence to point the finger of blame at the correct party.
If that party is your employer and it can be demonstrated that they were negligent in discharging their legal duty of care to keep their employees safe at work, for instance by neglecting to provide training in manual handling, the expertise of your workplace injury solicitor then really comes into its own as they establish the all-important causal link between that negligence and your injury. Using the example above that would entail demonstrating that the failure of your employer to provide you with manual handling training was the cause of or contributed to the severe back injury you sustained trying to move a large, heavy carton in a confined space in your office – a job for which knowledge of specific lifting techniques was essential if a musculo-skeletal or other injury was to be avoided. Your injury was, in other words, a reasonably foreseeable consequence of attempting heavy lifting without the appropriate and adequate training that you should have been given.
Job done? Far from it, but with an experienced work injury compensation lawyer on board you can let them do the heavy lifting when it comes to ensuring that you get all the compensation to which your injury entitles you.
