Personal Injury Lawyers: directory of firms

Section 11 of the Limitation Act 1980 sets three years for personal injury actions in England and Wales, measured from the date the cause of action accrued or, if later, the claimant's date of knowledge. Where the injured person dies before the period expires, the estate gets three years from the death or from the personal representative's knowledge, whichever is later.

Date of knowledge does real work in disease and negligence cases, where the harm is discovered long after the exposure or the treatment. Children's time does not start running in the usual way until adulthood, and people who lack capacity are protected differently. Scotland and Northern Ireland apply their own limitation statutes, with their own periods and their own wording.

Treat the deadline as the outer edge, not the target. Evidence degrades, witnesses move, CCTV is overwritten. Claims started near the limit are harder to run on the same facts.

Civil claims in England and Wales follow pre-action protocols. A letter of claim sets out what happened and why the other side is responsible; the defendant or its insurer then has a period to investigate and respond on liability. Most claims settle in that phase, without proceedings ever being issued.

Medical evidence drives the value. An independent medical expert examines you, reviews the records and reports on the injury, treatment and prognosis. Claims also cover financial losses, so keep receipts, payslips showing lost earnings, travel costs to appointments and evidence of care provided by family. Those quiet items are frequently the larger half of a claim and are impossible to reconstruct later.

Under a conditional fee agreement the solicitor is paid nothing if the claim fails, and a success fee if it succeeds. The Conditional Fee Agreements Order 2013 caps that success fee at 25 per cent for proceedings at first instance, and limits the damages it can be taken from: general damages for pain, suffering and loss of amenity, and damages for past pecuniary loss, with amounts recoverable by the Compensation Recovery Unit of the Department for Work and Pensions deducted first. Future losses are outside the calculation.

There are other deductions to ask about: after-the-event insurance premiums, unrecovered disbursements, and any shortfall between what the other side pays and what your own agreement says. The Legal Ombudsman sees a steady stream of complaints that begin with a client who signed without understanding what came off the cheque.

The Ministry of Justice runs the Official Injury Claim service for minor road traffic injuries in England and Wales, where a driver or passenger who was not at fault can claim without legal help and without paying for it. It is a portal, not a court, and it is built for straightforward cases.

Allocation in the courts also matters here. Under the Civil Procedure Rules the small claims track normally covers claims worth up to 10,000 pounds, but personal injury claims have lower thresholds within that: up to 5,000 pounds for road traffic injuries and 1,500 pounds for other personal injury claims. Below those limits, legal costs are largely not recoverable from the other side, which is exactly why the portal exists.