Woman Receives Substantial Damages Following Road Accident
We have recently settled a claim for a client who suffered a fractured sternum, whiplash, ligament damage to her back and shoulders and associated psychological trauma as a result of a road traffic accident.
Liability was admitted early by the other driver’s insurers. Our client required ongoing private medical treatment for continuing symptoms in her shoulder and cognitive behavioural therapy for the continuing psychological effects of the accident upon her.
Our client was employed on a part-time job share basis, providing IT cover for a large international business every alternate weekend. This included her being on call during the night. Both she and her job share colleague were contractually obliged to cover weekends when either of them were away, either through sickness or holiday. Varying rates of overtime were paid, depending upon the cover provided.
As a result of the accident, our client was off work for 5 months. When she returned to work, she was unable to work the full hours which she had done previously and claimed a continuing loss of earnings as a consequence. The nature and terms of our client’s employment meant that her loss of earnings claim could not be substantiated in the usual way by her employers confirming what she had been earning before her accident and comparing this with her earnings afterwards. Our client’s case was that the specific requirements of her job share contract meant that her loss should be calculated on the basis of what cover she would have provided had the accident not occurred. As it happened, her job share colleague was off sick for an extended period following our client’s accident and the payment which our client would have received had she been able to cover for this sickness period resulted in a much higher loss of earnings claim than would have been apparent from her previous earnings.
We were able to obtain supportive evidence from our client’s job share colleague to support her claim and secured a settlement of £85,000.00 for the client.