Senior Associate
Lucy is a Senior Associate in the Dispute Resolution team.
Her clients include well-known brands in the leisure and waste sectors, and work includes defending the businesses against claims for compensation from employees and customers in regard to accidents and other incidents on their premises, or involving their fleet of vehicles.
She investigates claims to ensure they are not fraudulent or excessive, and supports clients from initial response through to handling court proceedings. This includes personal injury claims, insurance claims as well as disputes over credit hire matters where replacement vehicles are provided following a road traffic accident and costs have not been mitigated by the claimant.
In addition, she advises on subject data access requests, usually from employees but also in relation to injury claims, and Equality Act claims arising from customer service complaints.
Recent examples of how Lucy has supported clients include:
- helping a leading hospitality company extract themselves from a contract with a car park operator, without penalty, after a rise in customer complaints over parking enforcement;
- reducing liability for car hire costs to £250 from £8,000 in a claim for a replacement vehicle in a road traffic accident;
- successfully defending an injury claim by an employee who said he had fallen down steps, by securing witness evidence that he had planned to make a claim and CCTV evidence that he used the steps without problem;
- causing a dance teacher to drop a fraudulent claim for compensation relating to an alleged long-term leg injury by showing that she was still dancing;
- successfully defending a claim by a rubbish collector that a recent change in his working conditions was causing injury from an extra workload, by demonstrating evidence from a manual-handling trainer that there was no risk if procedures were followed properly; and
- reducing liability for a personal injury claim from £250,000 to £6,500 by challenging the medical evidence and securing alternative medical evidence.