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The country's top civil judge has criticised the fact lawyers ran up a £120,000 bill just to win an office worker less than £3,000 in damages for a typing injury.
Claudia Slevin's case of repetitive strain industry was fought tooth and nail through the courts, with top QCs appearing on both sides, and ended up before the Master of the Rolls, Sir Anthony Clarke. Mrs Slevin, of Portsmouth, was yesterday finally awarded £2,915.90 damages for the injury resulting from her typing workload at the insurance office where she was employed.
But Sir Anthony said it was "a gloomy feature" of the case that Mrs Slevin's lawyers' bills come to £120,000 - more than 40 times the value of her award. When the legal costs run up by her employers - insurance company, Bennetts UK Ltd - are taken into account, the total costs of the case may well exceed £200,000.
Mr Martin Porter QC, for Mrs Slevin, said it was "unfortunate" there had been no pre-trial offer by the defendants to settle her case. He added that she had had to take her claim to court in order to win any compensation at all for her injuries. Mrs Slevin, 34, worked at Bennetts UK Ltd's offices in Portsmouth, Eastleigh and Southampton from April 2000 until she took voluntary redundancy in June 2003. Her job as an adviser entailed writing letters to customers, inviting them to renew their insurance policies. Jonathan Waite QC, for Bennetts UK Ltd, had argued that Mrs Slevin had failed to prove that her work posed a foreseeable risk of injury or that her wrist symptoms were the result of the amount of typing she had to do.