The claimants details have been changed but this is indeed a true case
Annemarie Ellis-Percival, a Personal Injury lawyer at Ward & Rider Solicitors, acted for a client who was injured at work whilst employed as an electrician.
His company was contracted to work on a new building site in Birmingham City Centre. Part of his job was installing electrical cables to the site.
There were a lot of materials and equipment lying around the site and on the day of the accident, our client tripped over some pipework which was sticking up out of the ground.
Our client fell heavily onto his left knee which he felt crack on impact. He was taken to hospital where initially medical staff thought he had simply sprained his knee; however he subsequently discovered that he had suffered a tear to a ligament in his knee.
He required an operation several months later. Unfortunately the operation was not successful and he then had to have a second operation approximately a year later. He lost earnings during these two periods of absence.
Ward & Rider pursued a claim against the company in charge of the site. The claim was put to them as it was their responsibility to keep the site free of objects on which employees could trip. The company in charge of the site quickly admitted liability for the accident and it was then a question of quantifying the amount of compensation that our client was entitled to.
After obtaining several medical reports, we eventually gained evidence to prove that our client would have slight ongoing problems to his knee as well as an early onset of degenerative change to his knee.
Overall our client recovered £30,000 in settlement of his claim, being for both the injury itself and for consequential loss of earnings for the two periods of absence.