Medical agencies and claimant firms have won a points victory in a costs battle in the latest instalment of the long-running dispute over fees. In the costs judgment JXX v Archibald, the claimants and medical agencies were today found to have been the successful parties overall following the High Court’s decision in March on whether they should have to justify their fees. Senior Costs Judge Rowley said the insurer defendants had effectively had to ‘write a cheque’ in the clai

Law firm revenue from clinical negligence cases has risen by over 7% this year to £1.8bn and will continue to grow at this rate for the next five years, researchers have predicted. Meanwhile, the number of clinical negligence firms continues to fall, with almost 500 law firms leaving the market since the summer of 2022. In the UK clinical negligence 2026 market trends report, IRN Legal Reports said the number of law firms working in the clinical negligence sector had been fal

A coroner has raised concerns about how hospitals communicate with one another after the death of a new mother. Senior Coroner for West Sussex, Brighton and Hove, Penelope Schofield said “confused” lines of communication between clinicians at the Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust and University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust “present a risk to the care provided to future patients”. The report follows the death of 30-year-old data analyst Gemma Robins, who died 40 days

Two time-critical conditions — cauda equina syndrome and compartment syndrome — dominate the highest-value orthopaedic claims, precisely because a short window for surgical intervention makes timing, rather than surgical technique, the decisive issue. Why Claims Arise in This Area Orthopaedic breach questions are frequently less about whether a procedure was performed correctly and more about whether red-flag symptoms were recognised quickly enough to act within a window asso

There is no radical ‘silver bullet’ solution to achieve “significant savings” in NHS clinical negligence compensation costs – but legal costs are not the real problem, MPs have been told. The Association of Personal Lawyers (APIL) presented a report to MPs which showed that clinical negligence claims and legal costs accounted for 1.6% of NHS England’s annual budget for 2025/26, down from 1.9% in 2019/20. “This context shows that the provision of compensation to victims of neg

General surgical claims rarely turn on whether an operation was technically indefensible in isolation — they far more often turn on what happened around it: the consent conversation beforehand, and how quickly a developing complication was recognised afterwards. Why Claims Arise in This Area Most recognised surgical complications — bleeding, infection, leak — are not, by themselves, evidence of negligence; they are known risks of the procedure. The claim usually depends on wh

The family of a toddler who died from sepsis after doctors "misdiagnosed him with constipation" have won a payout from the NHS. Hudson Cole Perrins was taken to Wolverhampton's New Cross Hospital by his concerned dad after he began complaining of stomach pains in June 2024. Doctors assessed him and told his parents the tot had constipation before sending him home after giving him two suppositories as well as an enema. Tragically, just four days later the "boisterous and cheek

Obstetrics consistently accounts for one of the largest shares of both claim numbers and total NHS Resolution damages — a reflection of how catastrophic the consequences can be when things go wrong during labour and delivery, and of how often successive national inquiries have found the same failures recurring. Why Claims Arise in This Area The Shrewsbury and Telford review, the East Kent maternity investigation, and the 2026 Ockenden report into Nottingham's maternity servic

Emergency departments see more patients, under more time pressure, with less background information than almost any other part of the hospital — and that combination makes A&E one of the fastest-growing sources of clinical negligence claims in England and Wales. Why Claims Arise in This Area Emergency medicine claims are shaped as much by system pressure as by any individual clinician's competence: overcrowding, corridor care, and boarding of admitted patients awaiting beds a

The value of the medico-legal market is back above £700m for the first time since 2019 amid concerns about a shrinking pool of experts, research has found. IRN Legal Reports predicted that, although the total number of personal injury claims would continue to fall, the larger medico-legal players were “in a relatively good position to maintain growth” and would “gain the most” from the spread of AI. It estimated that the overall value of the medico-legal market last year was

HMRC figures show a growing disparity between the pay of family doctors who own their practice and salaried GPs Hundreds of family doctors are earning at least £300,000 a year from the NHS, their take-home pay having increased by more than 20 per cent in real terms over the past decade. Figures from HM Revenue & Customs show that one in ten GPs who run their own practice are paid at least a quarter of a million pounds a year, while one in 20 earn more than £300,000. That f

The “justice gap” for personal injury victims is “dramatically widening” and 2.3m people every year are increasingly unlikely to seek redress, a report has found. The Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) said 44% of negligence victims did not claim compensation and only a fifth approached a personal injury lawyer. Researchers estimated that a total of 7.5m negligence victims had “never claimed compensation”. When it came to road traffic accidents, casualties had incr

A foreign doctor who bungled an operation so severely it was described as "not compatible with life" has been struck off the medical register. Dr Yasser Adly Abdel Rahman, an NHS locum surgeon, performed the emergency bowel procedure on a young man but botched the operation. This resulted in the contents of the patient's bowel, leaving his stomach, being re-deposited back into his stomach through a circular "closed loop", the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) hear

A patient died and “lasting, real harm” was caused to more than 100 people due to poor reading of heart scans by a former Derby doctor over seven years. On top of this, more than 361 patients encountered potential low harm and a further 379 patients faced failures over their cardiac scans. The University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust has issued an “unreserved apology” for the issues, detailing “deep regret” and saying it is “very sorry this has happened”,

NHS spending on claimant legal costs was static last year, even though the costs of low-value cases continue to rise sharply. The annual report of NHS Resolution (NHSR) showed that a record 84% of clinical negligence claims were resolved without the need for proceedings, which it said demonstrated the impact of the first year of its ‘Resolution Through Collaboration’ strategy. The strategy focuses on delivering “fairer resolution”, using data to drive learning, and strengthen

Faye Condon was wrongly diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease aged five and given gruelling chemotherapy - then seven years later the NHS discovered it got it wrong. A child has been wrongly given six cycles of chemotherapy after being misdiagnosed by the NHS. Faye Condon, 12, was wrongly diagnosed with the rare autoimmune disease Juvenile Dermatomyositis (JDM) aged five in a mistake mum Christina says “ruined her whole childhood”. Christina was not convinced by the diagno

Introduction The shoulder is one of the most complex and functionally demanding joints in the human body. Its exceptional range of motion comes at the cost of relative instability, making it vulnerable to a wide spectrum of injuries and degenerative conditions. An estimated 7% of the UK population suffer from shoulder pain, and there were 58,169 hospital admissions for shoulder and upper arm injuries in 2022–23 alone. Given this prevalence, shoulder conditions feature promine

Background The findings of the independent maternity review into services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH), published in June 2026, represent the largest maternity inquiry in NHS history. The review was commissioned in 2022 by NHS England. Its origins lay with a group of bereaved families who refused to stay silent — among them, a baby who died just before birth in April 2016, whose death was later confirmed as avoidable following poor care her mother receiv

Medical negligence lawyers say they stand ready to help address the wider issues raised in the latest devastating report on maternity care failings. A report by senior midwife Donna Ockenden following the largest maternity review in NHS history found that more than 500 mothers and babies suffered potentially avoidable harm or died from ‘systemic failings’ at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. The review examined cases between 2012 and 2025 and concluded that different

defence firm has helped to see off a record-breaking £4m case which was based on fabricated and exaggerated claims of life-changing injuries. The personal injury claim was made to the Motor Insurers’ Bureau following a 2017 incident in which a motorcyclist fell after being forced to avoid an untraced car in his path. The unnamed claimant received nearly £190,000 in interim payments before analysis of his social media activity posts, surveillance and expert evidence showed he