Industry news roundup: week ended 17 March 2014:
Sometimes the news is so bloody bizarre that you just don’t want to think about the kind of people who become personal injury lawyers nowadays.
I know that sounds a bit strange but once I fill you in, you’ll understand completely. Let’s start, shall we? Well this week it came to light that a secondary school pupil just walked off with in excess of £15,000 personal injury compensation damages after he was left with a little scar across his eyebrow in the wake of a completely mundane accident. The poor, obviously quite traumatised schoolboy took a DVD case to the face after his teacher tossed it at him, and it hit him just hard enough for the boy’s family to convince Essex County Council to provide them with the completely oversized damages award.
Apparently the damage has caused a ‘moderate cosmetic defect’ to the poor boy’s beautiful, pristine, Adonis-like face. And that’s worth a five-figure compensation award of course. No, I’m not taking the piss out of you – this is a real case and it really happened. A litle nick over the eyebrow and you’re rolling in the cash. Bloody Nora!
Meanwhile let’s look at another story this week shall we? This one deals with a much more serious injury – 34 year old Donna Gardiner, a Co-op branch deputy manager, had her right hand horribly mangled in an accident involving the razor-sharp rotating fan blades inside an air conditioning unit.
And no it’s not just a case of stupidity either. Donna was told by her supervisor to put her hand inside the machine to reset it, so she did so – never expecting that the damage she would sustain was to be so awful that even surgical procedures could never restore her full ability. To this date she can no longer do the things that mattered so much to her – like dressing her children and walking with both of them hand-in-hand. A bit worse off than a pupil with a bit of a scar over one eyebrow if you ask me.
Meanwhile her bosses at the Co-op have been fighting her tooth and nail over her compensation claim. They say that she should bear some responsibility for the accident, though to their credit Co-op personnel have admitted liability for the incident.