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Working in a no win, no fee solicitor organisation means that I have to follow the news relating to various kinds of personal injury, and there's one story this week that has particularly forced itself into my attentions.
This is the sad news that a couple who would have been in the recent plane crash involving the Air France flight out of Brazil have been involved in a car accident, which proved fatal for an Italian pensioner and caused serious personal injury to her husband.
It's not just the tragic aspect of the story that brings it to mind, although that's clearly part of it. To have missed the flight that crashed into the ocean must have felt like a new lease of life; to discover that the lease is only a week seems unusually cruel.
But there's another reason why the article in the Times that deals with it draws my attention - and that's the fact that it's drawn the attention of comment writers around the world. In the space of two days it's gathered almost 400 comments - and counting - which seem to have gone somewhat off-topic since an early commenter wrote "God must have really wanted her up there".
Since that point - only the third comment - the woman's death having occurred in a car crash rather than a plane has become something of an example in an argument about predestination and coincidence between religious and atheist commenters - neither of whom seem to be really listening to the other. As per usual for the internet, you might say.
So I want to be clear about acknowledging the physical and mental trauma that the survivor of the car crash is likely to face, and about wishing him well; not to do so would be falling into the same trap as the Times' commenters. But if we are to take the topic that the comment stream drifted into, as no win no fee solicitors, what are we to make of predestination?
The concept is one that suggests these things are fated; that everything that happens to us is the result of a pre-existing plan and that all thing that happen were supposed to in advance. Which means that nothing is an accident.
And for those of use providing personal injury compensation, the philosophical nature of the accident underpins what we do.
This is, of course, something that faced the theory of predestination since it was proposed by John Calvin in the later stages of the Reformation, four hundred years ago, and the various solutions to the problem have never managed to convince everyone. But they boil down to the assertion that it's right to behave as if we are in control of ourselves, and that we hold responsibility for our failings - and, philosophy or no philosophy, our no win, no fee solicitors choose to follow that line of thought. Or, of course, are destined to.
