Hello all, John blogging again.
I hope you are all safe and doing well in these strange and troubling times.
We here at Ibbotson Brady are working pretty much as normal, but from home, which brings its own challenges and rewards. One of those challenges gives rise to the title of this blog piece.
My fantastic colleague, Rebecca had a case a couple of weeks ago that was well advanced and so it needed the involvement of Leeds County Court. A fresh turn of events meant that the formal “Statement of Case” needed to be amended with the Court.
In normal times there is a strict protocol where you have to strike through the wording that you want to remove and underline the new wording added. This striking through and underlining has to be in red pen. And yes, this is very old fashioned and quaint!
This was pretty urgent and Rebecca found that as she was working from home (like so many of us), she couldn’t find a red pen, apart from her daughter’s red glitter pen from the craft supplies. She called the Court and, with some trepidation, asked if the glitter pen would do. The Court staff were most amused and said it was fine; the Judges have not lost their sense of humour in this tricky time.
So, we and the Court, and the opponents, now have lovely official red glitter pen amended Statements of Case.
On a more general level, we have decided that we are one of those lucky businesses that does not need to rush back to our office and our desks. We can do almost all that we need to do from home and so we will continue to do so for now. I am the only exception in that I go in to the office 2 or 3 times a week for half an hour or so, just to check for snail mail and that everything is physically okay.
Injury and accident compensation claims are ticking along fairly normally, although when we need expert medical opinion we are finding a lot of medics who are understandably and 100% correctly otherwise occupied on more important things during the pandemic. We will just have to be patient.
The lockdown has meant that accident rates are way down, which is one silver lining from the virus, but we are still getting calls about new claims, often from accidents that happened a few months ago that were put on hold. People now have the time to take these up and they are doing so. We are always available for a completely free chat if you think you might have a claim.
As well as pressing on with my normal work, I have a couple of exciting projects on the go that I will not reveal just yet. I will blog about them soon.
I will be adding a red glitter pen to the next stationery order to recompense Rebecca’s daughter….
Stay safe folks,
John