Posted on August 25, 2010 - by admin

The compensation culture myth

The press and the media love to get behind the jurists that claim that we live in a “compensation culture”. This serves to say that people take advantage of any sort of injury or slip up by authorities or companies to bring the law down on them and get some millionaire injury compensations. Usually the same two stories are used to back up this claim: the lady that sued a known fast food chain for selling her scalding hot coffee that burned her and the other lady that slipped on a wet floor that she accidentally made wet by spilling her drink. What is never said about these stories is that the spill was there for a long time without the employees cleaning it and that the coffee sold to the lady was, in fact, way above the temperature that can be legally sold.

And the cold truth is that, in this so cold “compensation culture”, the numbers of injury claims are actually going down, mainly due to lack of money to pursue legal action, but also because of the social stigma of it. And although not much can be done about the second one, the first one has one solution: no win no fee agreements.