Martin Hood, Associate Director and Deputy Head of our Medical Negligence department discusses how he has made a positive difference over the years.
If you’ve been on our website (and you should, it’s really rather good) you will see that our focus at Jackson Lees is “Making a Positive Difference” (or #MAPD, if you’re into Twitter).
The challenge when writing an article like this is always to find a new way to tell you why we’re good at what we do. Rather than focussing on ‘the bad’, of which there is sadly plenty at the moment, I decided this time to tell you about ‘the good’. The stories that follow are a couple of occasions that will stick with me as to when I’ve made, in my view anyway, a positive difference to my clients. A professional service is something we pride ourselves on across the board, but in situations where we have clients for many years there is often a deeper bond between client and lawyer. We are ringside for the highs and lows in their life during the period we act for them, and it means that much more to us when we can help fix those lows.
I’ve held details back where necessary to protect client confidentiality, but hopefully this gives you a flavour of why we do what we do.
A recent client of mine was a young man with a brain injury at birth. He was being cared for by a devoted but exhausted mum and dad. For me, reading that someone needs 24-hour care and actually seeing, up close, even for a couple of hours, what that care involves are two entirely different propositions altogether. The parents provided that care in a standard three-bed semi, as best they could in such a house. We engaged together in a search of their village to find a suitable property, and were able to secure funds to buy a bungalow that could be adapted. The work is now finished, and there is enough room for therapies, and for specialist paid carers to help at night, so that mum and dad can feel like mum and dad again.
I also recently finished a longstanding case for a client who had become a wheelchair user as a result of alleged negligence in a hospital. He had led a very active life beforehand, enjoying many sports, walking his dog, and camping. We were able to secure some of his damages whilst the case was still ongoing, so that he could get some of those freedoms back. The results included the purchase of a wheelchair-accessible vehicle that he could ride in up-front, and an all-terrain wheelchair that could be used to go for walks with his dog in the woods or on the beach. His family were kind enough to send me videos of him on those walks, and seeing their happiness (even in what looked like 25mph winds on the beach) has been one of the true high points of my job to date.
For a free consultation with one of our Medical Negligence specialist advisers, call us on 0800 387 927.