Ker-ching! Or, personal injury claim finally gets closed

Please excuse the braggard nature of this post, but it's not often you get a cheque like this and I wanted to write it up for the record. Pretty much on the 2 year anniversary of my car crash in 2007, I've finally received the settlement payment for personal injury claim. Below is the cheque in all it's glory, 5 gs baby.

The money was awarded because the accident aggravated my existing RSI symptoms which had been settling nicely and resulted in a fair bit of pain and anguish. The accident happened here as I was driving home from work one night. The visibility from the side road is pretty awful, so when I saw a car stick it's nose out over the give way line, I took my foot off the accelerator but thought little of it. "Oh, he'll roll back"; they always roll back right? Not in this case unfortunately, the car started to pull out further and then froze, right in my path. Unfortunately there was a car on the other side of the road and insufficient stopping distance for me. My poor old Peugeot 306 got written off pwned. Well and truly.

Having never written a car off before, or filed a personal injury claim before, I didn't really know what to expect from the process and I must say that my insurer Admiral was excellent through out the whole process. They appointed Bott & Co solicitors to deal with my personal injury claim and the best way I can summarise my personal experience with them was that it took two years to conclude the case. I think that because my case was a little out of the ordinary (aggravation of pre-existing condition) that may have poured some treacle into the process. There were a number of mishaps with medical records not getting requested, not getting requested correctly, not being forwarded to specialists, not being kept up to date and I actually had to spend quite a lot of time pushing them along to get the whole thing resolved. I think my assigned solicitor phoned me twice, once to say hello and then a few weeks ago to make me the £ offer. The terse telephone style was well compensated by the 3.5 conifers worth of letters I had dispatched to me though.