In almost every other kind of compensation claim, the first thing anybody asks is whose fault it was. In this one, fault is not the test. The question is narrower and much duller: was the person at work, doing their work, when it happened. The claim attaches to the employment relationship, not to anybody’s conduct. And once you see that, a great deal changes. The evidence that matters is completely different. Not witnesses to carelessness, not photographs of a badly kept machine, not an account of who broke which rule. Attendance. The duty roster. Whatever instruction sent that person to that place at that time. A gate entry. A site log. The name of the supervisor on shift. None of it looks like evidence to a family in a crisis, and all of it is what the claim is made of. Which leads to the central difficulty, and nobody warns people about it: the person the claim is against is also the keeper of the proof. Those records sit with the employer by the ordinary nature of running a workplace. That is not a conspiracy — and it is why the sequence matters, because records mostly vanish by attrition rather than by anybody deciding to lose them. The supervisor moves sites. A register fills up. A contractor’s engagement ends. So the first week is worth more than the first month, and a request made before anybody is thinking in terms of a claim is answered differently from one made after. Then the thing that misleads both sides equally: fault’s irrelevance cuts both ways. The injured person’s own carelessness does not automatically end a claim of this kind, which families do not believe; and an employer’s blameless safety record does not automatically answer one, which employers do not believe. So both parties routinely arrive arguing a case nobody is going to decide — and saying so plainly usually takes the heat out of the matter, because this is not an accusation. Two more. The hard matters are not the severe injuries. They are the ones where the connection to the work is arguable — travelling, a break, an errand, somewhere that is not the usual workplace. And the person who most needs this claim usually has the fewest papers: no appointment letter, no payslips, sometimes not even certainty about who the employer was. What we rule out: no figure, no view on which route to take, and nothing about how a proceeding will turn out — all three belong to an advocate, and on this subject we say so at the beginning rather than the end.
What this guide covers
Begin with the question, because every other thing on this page is a consequence of it, and because the question people expect is the wrong one.
When somebody is hurt and compensation comes up, the mind goes immediately to blame. That is not foolish. It is how most compensation in the world works, and it is the only version of the subject most people have ever encountered.
A claim arising out of employment does not turn on blame. It turns on whether the thing happened in the course of the work.
Look at the neighbours and the pattern is uniform.
A road claim is largely a question about how somebody drove. A claim about professional carelessness is a question about whether a standard was met. A third-party claim rests on somebody being answerable for what they did.
So the whole surrounding landscape teaches one lesson: find out who was careless and prove it. People arrive here having learned that lesson well, which is precisely the difficulty.
Here the subject of enquiry is not conduct at all. It is a relationship.
The claim attaches to employment. What has to be shown is that this person stood in that relationship, and that what happened to them belongs to it rather than to the rest of their life.
So the enquiry is about a join, not about a failing. Those are different investigations, with different papers, pointed at different people.
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Reduced to ordinary language, the thing to be able to show is this.
That this person was at work, doing their work, when it happened.
Not that the work was dangerous. Not that it could have been done more safely. Not that somebody should have noticed something. Simply that the person was there, in that capacity, doing that thing.
Exactly where the boundaries of that sentence lie, in a particular situation, is a legal question and this page will not pretend otherwise. But knowing that it is the sentence changes what you spend your first week on.
Three consequences, and they run through the rest of this guide.
We put this at the front rather than the end because the first week is where it costs something. A family that spends it gathering the wrong material cannot get that week back.
And here is the odd thing we see repeatedly: the mistake is symmetrical.
The family arrives determined to prove the employer was at fault. The employer arrives determined to prove it was not. Both have read the situation through the lens of every other compensation claim they know about.
So two parties spend months in an argument about a question that is not the test, growing more hostile over it, while the records that would settle the actual question age quietly in a cupboard.
The version of this that does the most damage is the quietest one, and it happens in the first conversation.
An injured person says, or a family says on their behalf: he was in a hurry, he should have been more careful, he had done it that way a hundred times. That is said honestly, often out of a kind of decency.
And then somebody concludes, from that honesty, that there is no claim — which is frequently wrong, and the conclusion gets reached without anybody ever asking a person who would know.
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The mirror image, and it is just as sincere.
An employer gathers its training records, its maintenance log, its safety certificates and its instructions, and presents a genuinely good account of a well-run workplace. All of it may be entirely true.
And then concludes that the matter is therefore answered. A blameless employer is not thereby a non-liable one in a claim of this kind, and the surprise, when it comes, is not pleasant for them either.
Set the two beliefs beside the actual question and the waste is obvious.
| What each side argues | What is actually in issue | |
|---|---|---|
| The family | The employer was careless | He was at work, doing work |
| The employer | We were not careless | He was at work, doing work |
| Evidence gathered | Witnesses, photographs, blame | Attendance, roster, instruction |
| Tone produced | Accusation and defence | A factual question |
| Time spent | Months | A week, done early |
The fourth row matters as much as the others. An argument about blame makes enemies of people who did not need to be enemies.
Which brings us to what actually gets gathered in the first fortnight, and why.
It is gathered energetically and in good faith, by people who are frightened and want to be doing something. And it is nearly all aimed at fault, because that is what everybody around them has said to do.
The commonest item, and the one most often volunteered by somebody helpful.
A co-worker who will say the equipment was poorly maintained. Somebody who will say warnings had been given and ignored. A person who will describe how the place was run.
That material speaks to blame. It is not useless — but it is not what the question turns on, and in our files it is the single largest category of effort spent on the wrong thing.
What those same people can establish, and nobody thinks to ask them, is far more useful: that the person was present, on duty, doing that task, on the instruction of that supervisor.
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The second commonest, and worth separating because photographs are not worthless — they are simply often pointed at the wrong thing.
Pictures of a broken guard, a wet floor, a frayed cable: all about fault. Pictures that show where the person was, what they were working on, the site itself, the gate, a notice board with a roster on it: about the join.
If somebody is going to a workplace with a phone, photograph the register, the roster board and the gate log, not only the machine. That single redirection is worth more than any witness.
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So here is the list we work from on every one of these, in the order we ask for it.
None of it is dramatic. All of it is ordinary business paper, which is exactly why it is reliable and exactly why nobody thinks to preserve it.
These two carry more weight than anything else on the list, because together they answer the question almost on their own.
Attendance establishes that the person was at work that day. The roster establishes what they were supposed to be doing and where. Put beside each other, they place a named person in a named place in a working capacity at a time.
They are also the two items most likely to exist, because a workplace cannot run without them. Which makes it all the more painful when they are asked for eight months too late.
The most valuable single item, when it exists, and the most often overlooked.
A message telling somebody to go to a particular site. A note assigning a task. A work order. A WhatsApp line from a supervisor saying be at the second gate by seven.
An instruction is the cleanest possible proof of the join, because it shows the work putting the person where the thing happened.
It is also the item most likely to be on somebody’s phone rather than in a file, which means it can be preserved immediately, by you, before anybody else is involved at all.
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And then the quiet records nobody thinks of as records.
A security register at the gate. A biometric or card entry. A visitor book at a client site. A transport log for a vehicle that carried workers. A delivery sheet signed at a time.
These are useful out of proportion to how trivial they look, for two reasons: they are contemporaneous, written at the time by somebody with no interest in the question, and they are time-stamped, which memory never is.
Now go back through that list and ask, for each item, where it physically lives.
Attendance: the employer. Roster: the employer. Instruction: a supervisor’s phone, or the employer’s system. Gate register: the employer, or the site owner. Site log: the employer. Payment records: the employer, and sometimes a bank.
With one or two exceptions, the entire file is in the hands of the party the claim is made against.
Which is the central practical problem of this subject, and it has no parallel in any other kind of claim we handle.
In a road matter the police record exists independently. In an insurance dispute the policy documents are in the claimant’s own hands. In a dispute about a contract, both parties hold a copy of the same paper.
Here the claimant holds almost nothing, and the respondent holds almost everything — not by design, but because that is how workplace records work.
And nothing in the ordinary course causes anybody to set them aside.
The family does not know they matter. The employer, at that moment, is dealing with an injured worker and an upset workforce and is not thinking about which register will be needed in a year. Nobody has told either side that the attendance sheet for that fortnight is the most important document in the building.
So the records are not hidden. They are simply left in the normal flow of things, which takes them away on its own schedule. The next section is about that.
Stated as plainly as we can, because it is the thing we would most want a family to understand on day two.
The person the claim is against is also the keeper of the evidence for it.
Not some of it. Nearly all of it. And that single fact determines the order in which everything should be done, which is why this page spends more space on sequence than on substance.
It is worth seeing how unusual this is, because the unusualness is what makes people get the sequence wrong.
| Kind of matter | Who holds the proof |
|---|---|
| A road claim | An independent official record exists |
| An insurance dispute | You hold the policy and the bills |
| A contract dispute | Both sides hold the same document |
| A service dispute | Mixed — you hold your own letters |
| This claim | The other side holds it all |
In every other row there is something you can produce without anybody’s cooperation. In the last row there is very little, unless you act early.
We want to be fair about this, because treating it as bad faith leads people to behave in ways that make the records harder to get, not easier.
In the matters that reach us, deliberate destruction is rare. What is common is something much more ordinary, and the next section describes it.
Approaching an employer as though they are concealing something is the fastest way to turn a cooperative office into a cautious one. A cautious office refers you to somebody, and that somebody takes three weeks.
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Here is how the evidence actually goes, and it is nobody’s fault.
Nobody decided anything. Six months passed, and the file became unavailable by ordinary means.
Which gives the single most useful instruction on this page, and it is about timing rather than technique.
Ask for the records while the matter is still a family trying to understand what happened. Not after lawyers are involved, not after a notice has gone, not after somebody has used the word compensation in a raised voice.
The same request, with the same words, is answered very differently depending on when it arrives. Early, it is handled by whoever has the file. Later, it is handled by somebody whose job is to be careful.
What the request should contain, kept short and unthreatening:
In writing, politely, addressed to a person by name, with a line saying what it is for. And one sentence that changes how it lands: that you are not alleging anybody did anything wrong. That sentence is true, and it is the most useful thing in the letter.
And then the discipline that costs an afternoon and decides matters a year later.
Everything you are given, keep. Everything you are shown but not given, photograph. Everything you are told, write down with the date and the name of the person who told you.
Including the refusals. A note saying that on a particular date a named person declined to provide the attendance record is itself a useful document, and it exists only if somebody wrote it down at the time.
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A word on why this matters more here than in most subjects.
A document that exists only in somebody else’s office is a document you cannot produce. Not cannot produce easily — cannot produce. People move on, offices change hands, premises close, and the obligation to keep things does not last forever.
The time to secure a copy is while somebody is willing to hand you one, and willingness is highest in the first fortnight and falls thereafter.
Where you need a formally certified version of something rather than a photograph, that is its own small piece of work and worth doing for the two or three items that carry the weight.
Many people reading this are months in, and the approach changes rather than ending.
Stop trying to recover the one register that has gone, and start assembling from independent directions. A workplace leaves traces in more places than its own filing cabinet, and several weak traces assembled together are sometimes stronger than one strong record would have been — because they are independent of each other and of the employer.
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Where we look when the employer’s own file is no longer available:
We put this list in writing because families assume that a lost register ends the matter. It frequently does not, and the reconstruction is ordinary work rather than detective work.
Back to the central idea, because it has a second half that is just as important as the first and much less often said.
If fault is not the test, then nobody’s fault is the test. Not the employer’s, which families expect. And not the injured person’s either, which they do not.
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So the sentence families most need to hear is this one.
That the injured person was hurrying, distracted, or doing the job the way he had always done it does not, by itself, end a claim of this kind.
How far that holds in a particular situation is a legal question, and we will not go further than the general shape of it here. What we will say is that the opposite belief — that any carelessness ends everything — is held confidently by a great many people and acted on in the first week.
And it is worth understanding why, because knowing the reason makes the point easier to accept.
Everything they know about compensation comes from fault-based claims, where carelessness on your own part genuinely does reduce or defeat what you recover. That instinct is correctly learned from the wrong subject.
There is also something else, and it is not about law at all. People who have just been through something frightening are often keen to take responsibility for it, and they say so early, to anybody who asks. That honesty then gets treated as a legal concession by somebody who should have known better.
Now the other half, addressed to whoever is on the other side of this, because it saves everybody months.
An employer with proper training records, a maintained machine, a clean history and written safety instructions has an excellent account of itself. All of it may be true and documented.
And none of it is an answer to the question being asked, which is about the connection to the work rather than the quality of the workplace. That is an unwelcome discovery to make late.
For the mirror-image reason, which is almost pleasing in its symmetry.
An employer’s entire experience of risk is fault-based: insurance, contracts, consumer complaints, regulatory matters. In all of those, demonstrating that you did everything properly is the answer. So demonstrating it here feels like the answer too.
We say this to employers who ask us about it as readily as to families. It is not advice on their position, which is for their own advocate. It is simply the same correction, pointed the other way.
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And then the two of them sit down in the same room.
One side says: you were negligent. The other says: we were not, and in any case he was. Both become more certain and less cooperative, because each believes the other is arguing in bad faith about something obvious.
Meanwhile the attendance register for that fortnight, which neither of them has mentioned, is three months closer to being unavailable.
Which has a practical consequence that is worth more than any document on this page.
Because fault is not in issue, the matter does not have to be adversarial from the beginning — and whether it is adversarial determines whether you get the records.
We are not suggesting anybody be naive, or that cooperation should be relied upon instead of copies. We are saying that the one thing which reliably destroys access to evidence is a first contact that reads as an accusation.
So this is worth saying out loud, in the first conversation and in the first letter.
Nobody is suggesting you did anything wrong. We are trying to establish what he was doing and on whose instruction.
That sentence is accurate. It is also the sentence that most often turns a careful office back into a helpful one, and in our experience it has recovered more records than any formal step taken afterwards.
A shift of subject now, because people assume the difficulty scales with how serious the harm was. It does not.
A grave injury with a clean connection to the work is, as a documentary matter, straightforward. A minor one with an arguable connection can be genuinely difficult.
The difficulty is never in the harm. It is always in the join.
Which means the situations to be careful about are identifiable in advance, and all of them share one feature: the person was not plainly at their usual workplace doing their usual task.
Four come up repeatedly, and the next four sections take them in turn. In each, we are not going to tell you the answer — we are going to tell you which facts decide it, so that you write them down while they are still exact.
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The commonest arguable situation, and the one where people most want a general rule.
There is no general rule available on a page, because it turns on the particulars. What to record, today, in detail:
Where a vehicle is involved there may be more than one kind of claim available, which is dealt with further down and is a decision for an advocate rather than for you.
The second: something that happens during an interval, or while the person is doing something adjacent to the work.
Fetching something. Going to eat. Helping with a task that was not theirs. Being sent out for a few minutes by somebody. Returning to the site early.
The facts that matter are about who asked, what for, and whether the activity served the work. Record the name of whoever asked, if anybody did, and whether a request existed in any written form — a message, a note, anything.
The third, and the one we treat most carefully, because it is where the strongest feelings and the weakest documents meet.
Something medical happens while a person is at work. The family is certain the work caused it. The employer is certain it did not. Neither of them can know, and we certainly cannot.
This page carries no medical content of any kind and we will not offer any view about causes. What we can do is preserve the facts: what the person was doing, for how long, in what conditions, what they said at the time, who they said it to, and exactly when they went for help. That record is what allows somebody qualified to answer the question later.
And the fourth, which is more common every year.
Work done at a client’s premises, at a site, in a vehicle, at home, or anywhere the employer does not control. The connection to the work may be perfectly real and is harder to show, because none of the usual records exist in the usual place.
Here the proof is almost always in the assignment rather than the location: what the person had been told to do that day, by whom, and what they were in fact doing. That is why the instruction matters so much, and why we ask about messages before we ask about anything else.
Pulling the four together, the common features are identifiable and worth knowing in advance.
If two or more of those apply, this is a matter to put in front of an advocate quickly rather than to work up slowly, because the facts that decide it are the ones that fade fastest.
And the things that make an arguable join a documented one, all of which are available in the first days and almost none of which are available later.
That last one is often the strongest item in the file, and it exists only if somebody kept the message or noted the conversation in the first week.
Which brings us to the single page we ask every family to write before we do anything else.
Not a statement, not an argument, not a submission. Plain sentences, in order: where the person was, what they were doing, on whose instruction, at what time, who else was there, who was told first, and what happened in the hours afterwards.
Dates and names. No conclusions, no blame, and nothing you are not sure of — where you are unsure, write that you are unsure.
In our experience that page, written in the first week, is worth more than anything produced from memory a year later, and practically nobody is ever told to write it.
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Now a matter we are deliberately going to leave unanswered, and we want to explain why rather than simply going quiet.
Depending on the facts, more than one kind of claim may be available for the same event — for instance where a vehicle was involved as well as the employment, which is a different claim entirely with a different test and a different forum.
And choosing between them is not a form-filling decision.
It can depend on facts that are not obvious from the outside, on what each route requires to be proved, and on considerations that have nothing to do with which sounds simpler. It is a legal judgement on a particular set of facts.
We are a document service. We can see what papers exist. We are not in a position to weigh routes, and anybody at our level who offers to is doing something we would not do.
Which matters especially because of what follows a wrong choice.
Once a step has been taken down one route, it frequently cannot be taken back. This is not a decision where a mistake costs time. It is one where a mistake can cost the claim.
So of everything on this page, this is the item we would most want somebody to take to an advocate first — before a notice, before a filing, before anybody signs or accepts anything.
An uncomfortable pattern, stated because pretending otherwise helps nobody.
The people who most need a claim of this kind are usually the ones with the least documentation of their own working life. No written agreement. No appointment letter. No payslips. Sometimes genuine uncertainty about who the employer actually was, because one person called them to work, another gave instructions and a third paid.
That is not a reason to assume there is nothing here. It is a reason to assemble differently, and the next section is how.
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What we build the engagement from when the formal papers do not exist:
Where any of those are in another language, a proper translation is worth having rather than a summary, and where a document’s own authenticity may be questioned, checking it is better done now than when somebody else raises it.
A file assembled from eight ordinary traces, each independent of the others, is a real file. We have put together stronger ones this way than from a single employer record.
Everything above is about which facts matter and how to preserve them. None of it is about what any of it is worth or how any of it will end. Those sit elsewhere, and on this subject the boundary is firmer than on most:
All of that is for an advocate instructed on your facts, with the medical part for the treating doctors. We say it here, early and in full, because this is one of the clearest advocate-first subjects we write about — and because a family given a number to hope for has been done a real harm.
Six endings from matters that reached us. In each, the people involved were doing their best with the advice they had been given.
Not one of the six was caused by the injury or by anybody’s bad faith. All six were caused in the first month, by the wrong question being asked.
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If you read nothing else here, this is the week that matters, and none of it needs a professional.
Seven items, two or three days, and no cost. In our experience this list decides more than everything that follows it.
The people who call, roughly in order:
What this work with us actually consists of, in the order it happens:
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On most subjects we describe the advocate’s part at the end. Here they lead, and we are the support, which is worth stating in that order:
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
For assembling this file properly — writing the one page of facts with you, setting out the chain of who engaged, instructed and paid, establishing the connection to the work from records rather than from accounts of blame, drafting the request to the employer so that it reads as a request, keeping an inventory of what exists and what is missing with the dates each item was asked for, building from independent traces where the employer’s own file has gone, obtaining certified copies of the items that carry the weight, arranging translations where needed, and handing the whole thing over indexed and dated in a form an advocate can use immediately — our charge is ₹7,999. The window of 3 – 12 months reflects waiting on records held by other people; our own work is a matter of weeks.
Not included, and why each one sits apart:
What the money buys, said without decoration: a file built around the question that will actually be asked, assembled while the records still exist. Nothing about it is clever. It is a week of ordinary collecting, done in the right week, pointed at the right thing — which is the one part of this that cannot be bought back later at any price.
Where the injured person came through a contractor, the chain this page asks you to reconstruct is the same chain a contract-labour file records month by month in advance. Same evidence, a fraction of the cost, and available on the day it is needed rather than built after.
We write the facts of the day down with you while they are exact, set out who engaged and instructed and paid, establish the connection to the work from attendance, rosters, instructions and entries rather than from accounts of fault, request those records in a form that reads as a request, build from independent traces where the employer’s file has gone, and hand an advocate a file they can use on day one. We give no figure, no view on route, and no prediction about any proceeding.
Why this page is written the way it is, and what it refuses to contain
Nowhere on this page: a section number, an amount, a range, a formula, a time limit, a worked example of a calculation, an answer to any of the arguable situations it raises, or a word of medical content. On a page about a compensation claim, those are most of the things a reader hopes to find.
The reason is specific to who reads a page like this. Almost everybody arriving here is in the first fortnight after something serious, frightened, and looking for a number to hold on to. A figure printed here would be a figure written for nobody, about facts nobody has seen, and it would be believed — and a family that has started hoping on a number makes different decisions about what to accept and when. We regard putting one on this page as a thing that would do actual harm, which is a stronger reason than the usual one about accuracy. The same applies to answering the arguable situations: a general answer about travelling, or about a break, would be acted on by somebody whose facts are not the general case, and the mistake would surface at the one point where it cannot be fixed.
What is left once all that goes is the part that is the same in every one of these matters, and it is the part nobody gets told. That fault is not the test, so the energy spent proving blame is spent on a question nobody will decide. That the records which do decide it are dull, ordinary and specific. That the party the claim is against is also the keeper of them, and that they vanish through transfers, replaced systems and closed sites rather than through anybody’s decision. That fault’s irrelevance misleads both sides equally, so families concede claims they have and employers assume defences they do not. That the difficulty is never the injury but the join. And that the first week is worth more than everything after it. None of that depends on a figure or a provision.
Why the advocate appears at the top of this page rather than the bottom. On most subjects we write, the documentary work comes first and a lawyer is needed for a narrow slice at the end. Here the reverse is true: the decisions that matter most — route above all — arise at the very beginning and frequently cannot be revisited. A page that mentioned an advocate only in its closing paragraph would be structured dishonestly for this subject.
What is deliberately absent. No statute, provision or rule. No amount, multiplier or period. No view on whether any particular connection holds. No medical statement of any kind. No prediction about a proceeding. No figure other than our own fee. For your own situation the sources that matter are an advocate instructed on the facts, early and before any step is taken; the treating doctors for everything medical; the employer’s own records, which is why requesting them in the first week is the thing we press hardest; and the memories of the people who were there that day, which are the only evidence that degrades on its own and the only reason to write them down now.
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