Personal Injury and Clinical Negligence

Our Personal Injury Team

Our personal injury team includes barristers with various levels of experience and is able to handle cases ranging from simpler, fast track matters to injuries of the utmost severity.

We understand the impact an injury can have financially, as well as personally, and aim to work quickly and efficiently with clients, their solicitors and their families to establish liability and gain intermediate compensation, pending a final settlement.

42 Bedford Row also represents those facing personal injury claims, including landowners and insurance companies.

The team has extensive experience of dealing with cases in the following areas:-

• Catastrophic injury
• CICA
• Credit Hire
• Employer’s liability
• Fatal accidents
• Fraud
• Group Litigation
• Industrial disease
• Product Liability
• RTA – MIB
• Travel cases

Here are some examples of our work:-

• Wastell v Chaucer Insurance Services - Richard Furniss for the claimant. Claimant was on motorcycle which collided with negligent pedestrian. Claimant seriously injured, a pedestrian killed. Pedestrian was taking a sign to advertise his insured burger van. Issue whether he was “using” the van so that the defendant insurance company is liable to pay. The claimant was successful. Defendant appealed, appeal compromised (damages paid).
• AW v (1) JS (2) Direct Line - Richard Gregory was instructed on behalf of the Claimant who sustained a traumatic brain injury in a road traffic accident, leaving him with residual neurocognitive deficits and psychiatric symptoms. Causation was complex due to pre-existing conditions and difficulties. An agreed settlement of the claim at £860,000 was approved by HHJ Simon Oliver in October 2017.
• Taylor v Allianz Insurance - Scott Matthewson for the claimant. A high value brain injury case arising out of a scooter accident in Spain. Complicated jurisdiction issues (under Brussels I and Rome IV) and complex quantum issues (failing business partnership as a result of cognitive deficits caused by the accident).
• Hegley v Warwick Road Maintenance Association – Paul Gurnham for the defendant. At first instance the district judge found a voluntary association negligent in failing to grit a private road, causing a schoolgirl to slip on ice and sustain injuries; reversed on appeal by His Honour Judge Yelton who held there was no duty on the association to grit the private road.