Claimant awarded £65,000.00 after tripping over a cable on the pavement

In January 2013 Mr T was walking down a road in Manchester when his foot became entangled in a large piece of cable on the pavement which was protruding out of the ground.  As a result he fell, sustaining a serious injury to his shoulder.

Legal proceedings were brought against the company who were the owners of the cabling and had carried out the installation and they admitted that the accident was their fault.

The issue, however, was one of the amount of compensation to be paid.

The Claimant at the time of the accident was working as a foreman/manager in the construction industry and, being self-employed, if he did not work he would not be paid.

In addition to the shoulder injury, which was a tear of one of the principal muscles, he also had a soft tissue injury to his wrist and elbow.

He was unable to return to work until January 2014, and even then the shoulder continued to trouble him.

Things got progressively worse and he was even having trouble sleeping because of the pain and could not undertake any heavy lifting.  Eventually the pain was so bad that he went into hospital in June 2016 for surgery for the re-attachment of the long head biceps tendon.

On his behalf we persuaded the Defendants to pay for the operation to be carried out on a private basis to save delay and to enable him to have the hospital and surgeon of his choice.

Regrettably, because he had had to take further time off work, he lost the job that he was in at the time of the operation which was extremely well paid and which offered a bonus of £10,000 on the completion of the contract that the Claimant was working on at the time of the operation.

To help him we successfully made applications for various interim payments to be made to the Claimant to make up particularly for his loss of earnings.

Medical reports were obtained by both ourselves and the Defendants’ solicitors and the two experts were sufficiently like-minded to be able to produce a joint report.

Nonetheless, the Defendants argued that the claim for financial losses was exaggerated.  They claimed that he was not earning what he claimed to be receiving at the time of the accident and said that both after the accident and after the operation he did not return to work as quickly as he should have done.

Accordingly, we had to obtain further evidence of his pre-accident and pre-operation earnings, and obtain a further report from the medical expert which confirmed that the Claimant had indeed returned to work as soon as was practicable bearing in mind the limitations that the accident and then the operation had put on him.

A month before the trial the Defendants made an offer of £50,000, which was rejected.  They were persuaded to increase that to just under £55,000 and that was rejected, and then two weeks before the trial they made an offer of £65,000 which was accepted.

Broadly speaking, that offer was made up of £15,000 for pain and suffering, around £47,000 for lost earnings and bonuses and £3,000 for gratuitous care which the Claimant received from family and friends both post-accident and post-operation.