LEGAL & LITIGATION
Don’t let the lawyers win
But Harrison continued: “If you do get a claim in, the last thing you want to do is liti- gate. A lot of claimants lawyers out there, like to make this a long, drawn-out affair, because that builds their fees up. I used to do a lot of the claims handling in-house. My policy was, if someone’s been injured at work and it’s partially our fault, in most cases you can get some contribution from the claimant themselves. That’s because they’ve been correctly trained and we’ve got the evidence to prove they’d been on these training courses, we’ve got the evidence that they’d signed to say they’d had a safety briefi ng before they started work, but then something still happened.
that by Network Rail, just push it back to them and say I think we’re covered by your policy, we don’t have to buy extra.”
How much do rail industry professionals and employers need to worry about litigation?
Harrison explained: “In terms of employ- er’s liability, at the company I worked for, we were very proactive; we knew of every incident that happened, whether it was a minor injury, a near miss or whatever, so that we could take recognition of that fact. As far as I’m concerned, ‘near miss’ is a
misnomer: it should be ‘near hit’. If some- body is involved in something that is a near miss, well, it could have done serious in- jury, so you’ve got to take account of that.
“If someone’s injured at work because of a failing in what their employer has done, yes there will be a claim that follows, and it could lead to litigation. But in most in- stances, what I say to rail companies is to be aware of what is happening out there. If you get any near misses, do something about it, because it could be a hit next time. Make it safer.”
“So you get a contribution from them. You go to the other lawyer and you’ve got all this evidence, very early on in the process, so if you get the claim you can always go to him and say ‘yup, we admit liability, but we want some contribution – this is the settle- ment we’re offering, put that to your claim- ant and we’ll get rid of it’. And that was the way we used to like to operate, because the only people who win if you do it any other way is the lawyers. The legal system makes money out of it.”
Social networking
Another peculiarly modern risk – one cer- tainly not confi ned to the rail industry – is the potential fallout from the online world, both malicious and accidental.
Harrison said: “One of the digital risks that has come to the fore is your employ- ees’ use of Facebook and LinkedIn. If they put something on there, it can be a major reputational risk for you, so you’ve got to be careful. I know of instances where, cer- tainly in the rail industry, you can no longer get onto Facebook at work, using your work email account. If you use your work email account to get on it, it gives your posts some extra credibility: it fl ows through with a company name after it.
“That could certainly give the employer problems with reputation; for every com- pany, reputational risk is a big issue.
“It’s true that when you see something and you realise who they’re working for and what they’re saying, people then say ‘oh, well he knows what he’s talking about be- cause he works for this company’. But of course he could just have a grudge against somebody in the company and think ‘well I’ll put this and see what happens’, not re- alising the impact on him and the impact it could have on the company. Cont next page >
rail technology magazine Aug/Sep 11 | 53
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