Head injured client receives over £700,000 following a road accident
March 23, 2017

Our personal injury team acted for a young man, aged 18 at the time, who sustained a head injury and a fractured shoulder when he was a passenger in a car.

The driver of the other vehicle was a German National driving a left hand drive car. He did a U-turn across a dual carriage and hit the car head on.

Our client was a student and had to give up College for a year but was then able to go back to education with a lot of help.

This case illustrates the importance of rehabilitation. Our client had early physiotherapy for the shoulder injury but, as is typical with a traumatic brain injury, his recovery from his other deficits was slow. We had to identify all his ongoing neurological and neuropsychological issues and wait to see how he coped with them. We persuaded the driver’s insurers to make a substantial interim payment so we were able to engage a case manager to coordinate his treatment and help him get back to College.

He found it hard to talk about the accident and became depressed so the rehabilitation process was long and difficult but having a structured care plan in place helped to get him back to college and then University. Despite his injuries he is about to start a Masters degree in computing.

The settlement included an amount to provide further support if needed in the future when he starts work as he will find it hard to hold down full time employment due to his difficulty with planning and motivating himself. It means he can also pay for support at crisis points in his life for example if he ever finds himself losing a job, struggling to cope with work, or if he suffers a relationship breakdown.

Once we knew how he had coped at college and University and we could be sure we had investigated and considered all his likely problems, we were able to secure a settlement in excess of £700,000 and our client has been able to move forward with his life.

For further advice on a personal injury claim please contact Beth King on 020 8313 1300 020 8313 1300 or email beth.king@marsons.co.uk Beth is an accredited member of the Law Society’s Personal Injury Panel and also belongs to the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers.

Many of Beth’s clients have been seriously injured in many different situations: at work (either through faulty equipment, unsafe systems or places of work, failure to provide protective clothing or caused by falling objects or falls from heights) or in road accidents (either as a pedestrian, motorcyclist, driver or passenger). Some of her clients have suffered serious permanent disability as a result of the repetitive nature of their work, such as work related upper limb disorders (WRULD) and other repetitive back injuries.