Personal injury lawyers

Family and pets, you can't you can't put a price on that, you really can't - particularly my Staffy. When I had the first accident, he became very protective of me. Well, I had two car accidents, both times rear-ended. The first one was just on my way home from work and sitting at a set of traffic lights. I ended up with yeah pretty severe spinal injuries out of that. That took a couple of years of um surgery and rehab.

Then another accident, and that pretty much put me straight back to square one. I loved my job, really did love my job, and the accident just changed all of that.

When it came to getting legal advice and support, I found Maurice Blackburn. I've known they've always had a really good reputation. Rang up and managed to get to talk to this lovely lady Canda, and straight away, from that very first time that I met her, she really made me feel really comfortable.

Working on cases like Susie's is really rewarding. It's her case at the end of the day, so she needs to be able to talk to who represents her and, in our case, we were able to have that really great dialogue and that's what gets you through the other end.

You feel very vulnerable, so you really need you know for your lawyer to help make that recovery go a lot smoother. Maurice Blackburn and Canda were, were really supportive all the way through - and still are to now - so that's really comforting.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is, I think, it's very misunderstood. The little things that seem so insignificant to a bystander can actually take you straight back to that moment. I was in charge on a night shift with this particular patient, and he seemed perfectly fine before he decided to stab me. He stabbed me in the face, missed my eye by a centimetre and I sustained a fractured eye socket and a penetrating stab wound. I’ve lost that passion for my job. I do want, I hope eventually that I will go back to it, but I can't say with any honesty at this point in time that I will go back to hands-on nursing.

I remember a conversation with Andrew, the first time I met him, and I went in and had a chat. And I just said, ‘should I even be doing this’? And I remember him saying ‘you 100 per cent need to let me do this with you’.

Amanda was, when she first saw me, she was really struggling she. She was clearly impacted by what had happened.

I just wanted to be heard, really. I wanted people to understand that the part that made me a good nurse was broken.

These cases are always difficult. The insurer, again, in this situation behaved badly. They denied liability. They made measly offers, and it wasn't until we pushed right the way through to make sure that she got the compensation that she was entitled to.

So it's been good to know that at least, in the regard of financially the damage has been repaired, yeah it's been good.

Well, about three years ago I, uh, I was looking in the mirror and I noticed a little, just a little, lump right here on my neck. Didn't think too much about it, but I was going to see my doctor anyway. He looked at me, ‘okay we'll get it checked out’. Got the ultrasound done about three days later. And from the ultrasound, I said I’ll just check the other side, just to be on the safe side. And at that point, I knew something was wrong. It was about a week later that we found out that it was it was melanoma.

The surgeon wanted to know where it came from and so they went back to some testing that was done a few years ago. And they found that that was the primary, that's where the cancer had started. And it was at that point that my doctor looked at me and said, ‘look, there's a problem here that I can't help you with, but you need to seek some legal advice because this should have been addressed a couple years ago. 

In relation to Bruce's case, he went to see a doctor and he had an examination and a test done, but unfortunately that test wasn't interpreted properly and that led to a delay in him being diagnosed with stage four melanoma of around two years. 

I didn't want to litigate, I don't want to deal with lawyers, I don't want to do any of this. I did it because of an obligation of the family that you know something happened and I’m not gonna last and you know we I need to make sure that they're taken care of. And to be honest I didn't want it in front of my mind, I had to I had treatments, I had work I had family and I had to deal with, you know, the fact that I’ve got cancer and and that's enough.

Medical negligence is a really complex area of the law. The reason why Maurice Blackburn is able to do such a great job for patients, who have had a medical error, is because we are the biggest national medical negligence department in Australia.

The decision to use Maurice Blackburn was the best decision we ever made. It took all the pressure off kathy and I. We didn't have to think about it. We didn't have to worry about it. We knew that we had them behind us and they had the expertise.