Rear-ended in traffic? Five things to check before the three years run out

A driver stopped at a light on a wet Tuesday in March is hit from behind by a van doing perhaps fifteen miles an hour. She feels fine at the scene, exchanges details, drives home, and wakes on Thursday unable to turn her head to the left. She books a GP appointment for the following Monday, takes four days off from a job that pays hourly, and her mother comes over each evening for a fortnight to help with the children. Nothing about that sequence is unusual, and almost every stage of it later becomes a question of evidence.

1. Work out which day the clock started, not which month

The limitation period for a personal injury claim in England and Wales is three years, and the safest assumption is that it runs from the date of the collision itself, meaning proceedings must be issued at court, not merely intimated to the insurer, before the anniversary passes. The exceptions are narrower than people hope: a claimant under eighteen has three years from turning eighteen, a claimant who lacks capacity may have no limitation running at all, and where an injury only becomes apparent later, the clock can start from the date of knowledge. Courts also hold a discretion to disapply the period, but it is exercised sparingly.

2. Treat special damages as a filing exercise from week one

General damages compensate the injury; special damages compensate everything the injury cost, and the difference matters because the second category is proved with paper rather than opinion. That means prescription receipts, physiotherapy invoices, mileage to appointments, the cost of a rental car, and the repair or write-off figures the insurer has already seen. The driver in the example who paid a friend cash for two weeks of school runs will struggle to recover it; the same driver who wrote down each date, each journey, and each amount, and kept the bank transfers, will usually recover the lot.

3. Evidence lost earnings the way a payroll department would

Four days off an hourly job sounds simple until someone asks what was actually lost, and the answer is net pay, not gross, calculated against what the earnings would have been. Payslips for the thirteen weeks before the collision, the payslips covering the absence, and a short letter from the employer confirming the dates and the deduction will settle most of it. Self-employed claimants need accounts, tax returns, and often invoices showing work turned away. Gratuitous care given by a relative is recoverable too, valued by hours and a commercial rate, then discounted because no wages or tax were paid.

4. Understand that the medical report, not the story, sets the value

An insurer values an injury from an examining expert's written prognosis, which is why the report drives the number more than any account of how bad the first fortnight felt. The examination is often brief, so the useful preparation is chronological: when symptoms began, what they stopped the claimant doing, what treatment was received, and whether anything remains. If the report says full recovery at eight months and the neck still aches at fourteen, that is a mismatch worth raising before the report is served, because a settlement built on the wrong prognosis is very hard to reopen.

5. Read the first offer against the published brackets

The Judicial College Guidelines set out brackets for injuries by type and duration, and they are the reference judges use, so a careful reader locates the bracket that matches the prognosis and compares it with the offer before responding. Check three things: whether the offer is inclusive of special damages or in addition to them, whether it accounts for the full recovery period rather than the period up to the examination, and whether any deduction for contributory conduct has been applied silently. A first offer is a position, not a valuation, and asking which bracket produced it is a fair question.

The claim that settles well is usually the one where somebody kept a diary, saved receipts nobody asked for yet, checked the anniversary date against the day of the collision rather than the month, and read the medical report closely enough to notice what it got wrong.