RTA Compensation increased 2.5 times by Bartletts Solicitors

When pursuing a claim for compensation following an accident, it can be very tempting to accept the first offer to settle that is put forward by the other party, especially if you think the case is dragging on for a long time.

In fact it is quite usual for personal injury cases to take many months, sometimes years in extremely serious accidents, and this can be part of the strategic approach by the insurers who hope that you will settle as early as possible for as little as possible.

However, experienced personal injury solicitors, such as Bartletts, know what level of compensation you should rightfully expect to receive for a particular injury because we are handling these types of cases all the time. If we feel that the other party has made an unreasonably low offer then we will advise you to reject this and proceed to the next stage.

This was the case recently for an elderly lady who suffered a relatively serious whiplash injury in a road traffic accident. Another car drove into the rear of her car, whilst she was stationary in traffic and she took almost a year to recover from the resulting whiplash.

Due to the circumstances of the accident, the other driver admitted liability and their insurers offer compensation of £1,760 for the injury at the outset. We advised our client, not to accept this and issued court proceedings on her behalf.

The insurers increased the offer to £2,500, which we also rejected, and then suggested £2,850. Whilst it might have been very tempting to settle at this point, in our experience of whiplash injuries, we felt that this was still well below what she could reasonably expect a court to award her.

We therefore advised our client to reject the offer for a third time and the case went to court, where she was awarded compensation of £4,640 - two and a half times the original offer.