In the vast majority of cases a person injured in an accident caused by someone else’s negligence will be the one making a claim for compensation. If you’ve suffered and lost money because someone else didn’t behave in a reasonable manner then you’ve every right to seek compensation, both in recognition of your pain and distress and in order to ensure that you’re no worse off than you would have been if the accident in question hadn’t happened. There are some cases, however, in which the person making the claim won’t actually be the one involved in the accident.
One set of circumstances in which you might make a claim on behalf of someone else is if a child is hurt in an accident or due to medical negligence. If, for example, a baby suffers birth injuries which lead to disability then there’s a strong possibility that they will need care and medical help for the rest of their life. Clearly, a child cannot fight their own case and so a parent will engage the services of a personal injury lawyer on their behalf.
The same applies if a person to whom you are closely related suffers an accident or illness which leaves them incapacitated and unable to fight on their own behalf. If, for example, the breadwinner of a family has been left paralysed, then the compensation for any dependents will include an amount to make up for the income stream which has been lost.
There are, of course, other cases in which you have to make a claim on someone else’s behalf, and those are the tragic cases in which someone has been killed as a result of negligence. In the immediate aftermath of a shocking event such as this, a compensation claim may be the last thing you’re thinking of, but losing a member of a family is clearly going to have a devastating effect, both emotionally and financially, and the compensation awarded might just allow you to start putting your life back together.
