This post has been contributed.
A few days ago, on November 24th, an Irishman won a personal injury claim. Nothing so strange about this sort of news, right? Personal injury claims are won all the time, after all. (And lost, of course!) Well, this one seems to have caught the interest of many people in the legal world. The case of this Irishman is slightly different from most. That’s because this personal injury claim was his ninth successful personal injury claim.
The man’s name is Anthony Lynch, and he hails from Limerick, Ireland. He’s 38 years old and has two kids. And Judge James O’Donohue of the Limerick Circuit Court awarded him €10,000 last week. (That’s around $10,618!) Judge O’Donohue has labeled Lynch “a very unfortunate, accident-prone individual.”
When you hear that someone has made nine personal injury claims in their lifetime, alarm bells might start ringing. Indeed, many people would jump to the conclusion that the man in question is repeatedly committing insurance fraud of some kind. It might be worth checking out some insurance fraud statistics for those of you who would jump to such a conclusion. You can read more about them at http://mademan.com/.
But Judge O’Donohue’s words certainly help solidify the idea that Lynch is, in fact, just really unlucky. Right? Well, I guess it depends on across how many years he’s been filing these claims. Records state that his first claim was made back in 1998, when he must have been about twenty. He was involved in a car accident, and was awarded €7,600 ($8,069) for his subsequent suffering.
Bearing in mind that he filed his latest claim in 2015, this means that he’s filed nine claims in the space of about seventeen years. This means he averages out at about one claim every two years. Which is definitely more than your average person! But how unrealistic do you think it is that someone would suffer nine injuries in the space of seventeen years? When you think about it like that, things don’t start to look that unrealistic. We may, in fact, be dealing with someone who is fully aware of his rights. When he is injured because of the fault of someone else, he takes action. This is something that’s actually not as common as it should be. A lot of people just let it be - which is, of course, a mistake. If you’ve suffered from the same, check out http://ankinlaw.com/.
A full list of the unfortunate man’s various past injuries can be found at http://www.irishtimes.com/. Before you continue to dismiss such claims, it’s worth pointing out that many of them were road accidents. Very difficult to fake, right? He is also on welfare for the various long-term injuries he has suffered from these incidents. In total, he has claimed €115,000 in injury compensation. That’s just over $128,000.
For some, there won’t be enough to convince them that this person isn’t just a “chaser”. But for many others, it might make you think about how often you really ever get what you’re owed. 
