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Boyes Turner’s personal injury lawyers secured a £337,500 provisional damages settlement for a client who suffered a serious injury to her leg in a road traffic accident.

Our client was a rear seat passenger in a taxi. She was injured when the driver failed to slow down as he approached a red traffic light, colliding with a car that was already stationary at the lights.

Our client’s serious injury to her right leg included a comminuted (crushed) fracture of the proximal tibia and a complex vascular injury, which put her leg at risk of amputation and life-threatening complications. Her leg needed external fixation, debridement procedures (cleaning or clearing dead tissue from a wound), and a skin graft. She was left with permanent aching and swelling in the leg and the possibility of developing degenerative changes in the knee. The appearance of the leg is severely affected by scarring from skin grafts and an obvious and unsightly defect, which requires a prosthetic plug.

The taxi driver’s insurers admitted liability for the accident but sought a 25% reduction in our client’s compensation because our client wasn’t wearing a seatbelt at the time of the accident. After detailed consideration of the medical expert evidence, agreement was reached on the basis of an 80/20% settlement in our client’s favour. The 20% reduction in our client’s compensation reflected her contributory negligence and the effect that her failure to wear a seatbelt had on the severity of her injuries.

After obtaining evidence from experts in the fields of orthopaedics, vascular surgery, plastic surgery, psychiatry and prosthetics, we secured a significant interim payment. This enabled our client to pay for prosthetics to mask the unsightly defect and improve the appearance of her leg.

The defendant made an offer to settle of £50,000, which we advised our client to reject. After negotiations, we reached a settlement of £337,500 on a provisional damages basis, ensuring that our client could return to court for further compensation in the event that she suffered certain specified complications, including amputation, in future. 

If you have suffered a serious injury in an accident caused by somebody else’s negligence, and you would like to find out more about making a claim, you can talk to one of our solicitors, free and confidentially, by contacting us here.