How Much Compensation For A Broken Leg In A Public Place? Case Study And Guide On Broken Leg Claims

Have you suffered from an injury that may not have been your fault? Are you seeking free legal advice regarding compensation for a broken leg? If you have a leg fracture caused by someone else’s negligence, this article can help explore whether you are eligible to make a personal injury claim.

Moreover, this guide will provide you with more insight into No Win No Fee legal agreements regarding personal injury claims. The article will provide an illustrative case study that will explore a personal injury claim, helping to portray what the outcome of seeking compensation for a broken leg could be.

If you’d like free legal advice from our team, contact us on 0800 408 7826 to discuss your case. We can then put you in contact with our expert panel of lawyers. Alternatively, you can get in touch via our contact page or chat with us instantly through our live chat pop-up box. Our expert team can offer you free legal advice regarding your injury.

About Leg Fracture Injuries

A Guide On How Much Compensation For A Broken Leg You Could Claim
What Is A Broken Leg Injury?
Broken Leg Accidents In Public Places
How A Public Accident Solicitor Could Help You
£60,000 Compensation For A Broken Leg: Case Study
Calculating Special Damages
Calculating How Much Compensation For A Broken Leg You Could Claim
No Win No Fee Compensation For A Broken Leg
Get In Touch For Free Legal Advice
Related Resources
Broken Leg Accident FAQs

A Guide On How Much Compensation For A Broken Leg You Could Claim

Firstly, you may have some questions before you explore claiming compensation for a broken leg:

Who breached their duty of care to protect my health and safety?
How did they breach that duty of care?
Did their negligence cause my injuries?

An important thing to note is that you cannot claim compensation for a broken leg if no duty of care was breached. This guide will help you to better understand whether a duty of care was breached and who is responsible.

There is specific legislation that is designed to safeguard and protect us in:

Road traffic accidents (RTA)
Public places (public liability)
The workplace

In this guide, we focus on public liability. The controller of the place you suffered your injury has a duty of care to take reasonable steps to keep you safe. If this party breaches their duty of care which causes you injury, you could make a personal injury claim.

What Is A Broken Leg Injury?

Our legs are arguably one of the most important body parts. Our leg contains multiple bones that all assist our mobility and quality of movement. If one or more of these bones is fractured due to a strong enough force, day-to-day life may become difficult.

Due to this debilitation, you may have to take time off work and, consequently, lose financial income. The NHS states that a broken leg will be excruciatingly painful and you probably won’t be able to walk.

Additionally, your leg is likely to look bruised and swollen. It is stated that if you fear you may be suffering from a broken leg injury, attend A&E immediately, or call 999 if the injury seems severe.

Some things you can do whilst you are on your way to A&E are:

Don’t move the injured leg—keep it elevated and resting on a cushion for support.
Do not try to fix the broken leg by attempting to move the bones back into place.
Maintain pressure on any open wounds that are bleeding

For a minor break, your leg will usually heal in around 6–8 weeks. Your doctor may give you crutches or a wheelchair in order to give your leg the highest chance of smooth recovery. On the other hand, more severe fractures can take around 3–6 months to heal, maybe even longer.

However, according to the NHS, there can sometimes be complications:

Damaged nerves, muscles, or blood vessels: The injury itself or surgery can cause damage to the leg. This may leave your leg feeling numb and weak.
Compartment syndrome: This a serious condition and occurs due to swelling or bleeding within the muscles. Unfortunately, this tends to require emergency surgery to relieve the pressure in your leg.

Broken leg accident statistics

Though relevant statistics on public accidents that result in a broken leg injury are not readily accessible, we have access to statistics regarding settlements recorded by the Compensation Recovery Unit (CRU) from 2015-2020.

This gives us an estimate of how many injuries occur due to public accidents. However, these statistics are simply settlements, so they do not show us how many overall claims were made or how many public broken bone injuries happened overall.

Though the graph appears to suggest the number of settlements is decreasing, there were 83,511 settled public injury cases registered to the Compensation Recovery Unit in the year 2019 to 2020. This is arguably a significant amount.

Broken Leg Accidents In Public Places

Unfortunately, broken bones can lead to osteoarthritis, making an individual more likely to experience a fracture if they fall. This can lead people to develop mild agoraphobia as they want to avoid falling and injuring themselves further.

A public place is anywhere accessible to the public; for example, a supermarket, streets, roads, and leisure centres. If the controller of the space (known as the occupier in law) fails to complete the necessary inspections and misses hazards, they could be responsible for negligence if someone is injured as a consequence.

Do occupiers always owe a duty of care?

It is of vital importance that those responsible for public places follow the guidelines contained within the Occupiers’ Liability Act 1957. Importantly, the legislation states that anyone in control of public space has a duty of care to safeguard and protect members of the public.

How could occupiers breach their duty of care?

An occupier of public land has a duty of care to safeguard the public. They can do this by carrying out regular safety checks to ensure that there is no reasonable chance that a member of the public could suffer an accident.

If occupiers’ fail to remove or reasonably reduce the risk of accidents and injuries, they may have breached their duty of care which could result in a negligence claim being made against them if someone is injured.

Leg Injury Claims – Do I Need Evidence?

As part of the claims process, you need to be able to prove that your injury was caused by negligence. This involves the party in control of a public space breaching the duty of care they owed you and causing you harm as a result.

As such, part of the process of making a leg injury claim includes gathering evidence. Here are some pieces of evidence you could present when claiming compensation for a leg injury:

Medical evidence – This can include copies of X-rays, prescriptions, and other information pertaining to your injury.
Contact details for witnesses – These can be gathered for witness statements to be taken at a later date.
Visual evidence – For example, you can take photos of your injuries and of the hazards that caused them.

To learn more about the leg injury claims process, get in touch with our advisors on the number above.

How A Public Accident Solicitor Could Help You

If you have suffered a public injury that you suspect may not have been your fault, you may be eligible to make a personal injury claim. Our expert legal team would love to have a chat with you and discuss your case further. We are available via telephone or live chat 24/7 to offer free legal advice about how a public accident solicitor could help you.

However, we cannot give you specific advice about your personal injury claim value until we learn more about your accident. Once we have had a chat with you to learn more about your injury, we would be delighted to offer you free legal advice.

Please note there is generally a three-year time limit for pursuing your personal injury claim. You might not be able to pursue a personal injury claim if it is over 3 years from the date of the accident or 3 years from the date you gained knowledge your injury was sustained from or worsened by the accident.

If you do make the decision to speak to us, you are under no obligation to continue with our services and be forwarded to our panel of lawyers. However, if we believe you have a valid claim and would like to proceed with it, we can then forward you to our experts to help value your claim.

£60,000 Compensation For A Broken Leg: Case Study

Mr Mills is a worker at a local retail shop. At lunchtimes, he would leave the shopping centre to sit outside and eat. On this particular day, the escalators had stopped working, so he had to step down carefully. He suddenly slipped on spillage and trapped his leg under his own weight as he fell.

He suffered a serious compound fracture leg injury, meaning his bone was exposed through the skin. The reason he fell was due to an unattended spillage, as the shopping centre had breached their duty of care by not attending to it when made aware of it.

Mr Mills attended A&E immediately and was given a cast and crutches to help heal his leg. This meant he was unable to attend work for 6–8 weeks whilst the broken leg injury healed, so he lost out on his regular financial income.

He made the decision to chat with a No Win No Fee personal injury solicitor to discuss how much compensation for a broken leg he could claim. The personal injury lawyer concluded that Mr Mills’ case was strong enough to make a claim against the shopping centre for breaching their duty of care.

What was the claimant’s final settlement?

Mr Mills was awarded £55,800 compensation in general damages as the injury led to arthritis, which severely limited Mr Mills’ ability to walk without experiencing pain and meant he had to start regular physiotherapy sessions. This unfortunately meant that there was a possibility of further medical treatment in the years to come.

The NHS states that the symptoms of arthritis are:

Swelling, stiffness, and pain in the joints
Restricted joint movement of the joints
Muscle weakness
Red, warm skin over the joint

How was this settlement calculated?

Mr Mills was also awarded special damages of £4,200, which is broken down in the table below.

Types of Special Damages:	Includes:	How much?:
Travel Expenses	Mr Mills had to travel by bus to and from hospital, GP, solicitor and physiotherapy appointments.	£500
Medications/Prescriptions	Mr Mills had to have prescriptions and some private physiotherapy.	£200
Care Costs	Mr Mills’ wife had to take time off work in order to care for him as he couldn’t walk without experiencing severe pain.	£1,000
Loss of Earnings	He had to take time off work as he couldn’t partake in his usual manual labour.	£1,500
Other Financial Losses	Lost holiday deposit	£1,000

Mr Mills’ case study is a fictional scenario based on our past experiences with broken leg personal injury compensation claims.

Calculating Special Damages

Special damages are compensation for the financial losses that the injury has caused. Mr Mills was awarded £4,200 in special damages. These included travel expenses, medications, prescriptions, his partner’s time spent caring for him, his loss of earnings, and other financial losses.

To ensure you receive the correct amount of special damages compensation, you must provide evidence. This could include bus tickets to show how much it cost for you to travel to and from medical appointments.

Alternatively, general damages are compensation for physical and psychological harm the injury has caused.

There are other financial losses you could recover as special damages. To find out what you could claim for, call our team of advisors on the number at the top of the page. They’re ready for your call at any time, day or night.

Calculating How Much Compensation For A Broken Leg You Could Claim

How much compensation for a broken leg you claim involves the severity of your injury. This gives an indicator of what physical and psychological harm you suffered, and it can impact your financial loss. Together, this indicates how much special and general damages you could receive.

Some guides have a personal injury calculator, however, we often find they are misleading and, in this case, they wouldn’t provide a realistic representation of how much compensation for a broken leg you could receive.

The quickest way to assess your personal injury claim is to get in touch with our team for free legal advice. You can give us a call or, alternatively, chat with us instantly through our live chat pop-up box. We can help you today by simply discussing your personal injury and learning more about it.

No Win No Fee Compensation For A Broken Leg

Hiring a personal injury solicitor can lead to a No Win No Fee agreement. This means you and your lawyer sign a contract stating that you won’t have any upfront solicitor fees to pay during the claim process.

A No Win No Fee agreement means that you won’t have to pay legal fees to your personal injury solicitor if your case fails. On the other hand, if the case succeeds, your lawyer may deduct a small, legally capped percentage of your compensation.

No Win No Fee agreements are common as it means the claimant only has to pay the lawyer’s fees if they win the case. This is also known as a Conditional Fee Agreement.

If you decide to contact us, our team can discuss how much compensation for a broken leg injury you could receive and we can connect you with our panel of expert lawyers. Our lawyers can then assess your claim more thoroughly and discuss No Win No Fee agreements with you.

Get In Touch For Free Legal Advice

We hope this article has helped you gain more understanding surrounding compensation for a broken leg, and some clarity that it may not be your fault.

Would you like to discuss your injury with a personal injury solicitor? Do you want to discover more about pursuing a personal accident claim? Contact us now to receive free legal advice and we can connect you with our panel of lawyers.

You can contact us by:

Calling us on 0800 408 7826.
Speaking to a member of our expert legal team through our live chat pop-up box.
Writing to us regarding your personal injury claim on our contact page. We will get back to you at whatever time best suits you.

Related Resources

Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974: This legislation provides guidelines regarding employers’ duty of care that safeguards employees.

Health and Safety Executive: The Health and Safety Executive gives access statistics regarding personal injury claims and breaches of duty of care.

How do I know if I’ve Broken a Bone?: The NHS explains how to know if you’ve broken a bone, as well as providing advice on how to seek help from a broken bone injury.

Check out more of our personal injury claims guides below:

Broken Leg Accident FAQs

Is a broken leg a serious injury?

Some broken leg injuries can be more serious than others, although they all tend to be painful and debilitating.

A greenstick fracture leg injury is more common in children as their bones are softer. This is where one side of the bone cracks and the other side bends but does not break. This fracture often takes around 4–8 weeks to heal and requires regular X-Rays to monitor the recovery process.

On the other hand, a bilateral leg fracture of the tibia often results in serious injury. Unfortunately, people with a bilateral leg fracture may have to undergo amputation so the leg doesn’t get infected.

We advise seeking medical professional advice on your specific broken leg injury.

Where can I go with a broken leg?

If you suspect you may have a broken leg, you should attend A&E immediately. If you cannot easily access A&E quickly, you should call 999 to request an ambulance.

How much compensation can you get for a broken leg?

We cannot explicitly tell you how much compensation for a broken leg you could receive. However, some leg fractures are likely to enter a higher compensation bracket than others.

Broken leg injuries that involve the fibula or femur bones are likely on the lower end of the scale for general damages.

Alternatively, the higher end of the general damages bracket involves cases where an individual suffers from long-term limps or impaired mobility due to the injury.

A serious broken leg injury may require an individual to permanently rely on mobility aids, such as crutches and wheelchairs. Consequently, this would likely give someone a higher compensation rate as their life is severely affected.

Written by IE

Checked by TH

How Much Compensation Could I Claim?

No Win No Fee Claims