Grewal v Khan

[2013] NSWDC 61

District Court

New South Wales

Medium Neutral Citation:	Grewal v Khan [2013] NSWDC 61
Hearing dates:	19,20 March 2013
Decision date:	03 May 2013
Before:	Judge Williams
Decision:	Verdict for Plaintiff
Catchwords:	MVA assessment - no matter of principle.
Cases Cited:	Ackling v QBE Insurance (Australia) Ltd 2009 NSWSC 881 MAA of NSW v Mills 2010 NSWCA 82. Kallouf v Middis 2008 NSWCA 61
Category:	Principal judgment
Parties:	P: Inderdeep Grewal D: Solomon Khan
Representation:	P: Mr Lidden SC with Mr Khandhar D: Mr Catsanos Brydens Law Office for plaintiff Moray & Agnew for defendant
File Number(s):	2011/381072
Publication restriction:	Nil

Judgment

1. The adversarial system is ill equipped to determine medical, economic loss and dependent care issues in personal injury cases. It is astounding over the years how convoluted and impenetrable have become the means by which judges are expected to decide such matters. Regardless of the attempts to codify the problems in legislation such as the Motor Accidents Compensation Act (MACA), the Civil Liability Act (CLA) and the Work Injury Damages Act (WIDA), a lay person reading appellate decisions on these issues, could be forgiven for thinking he or she had arrived in a foreign country in their attempt to understand the Byzantine depths of legal logic and English grammar that has accompanied the attempted rationalisation of the law in regard to such claims in ordinary litigation.

1. Lawyers, undeterred by the legislation or case law, have thought up more and more devious ways of extracting money from insurers, especially in regard to dependant care services and economic loss, that has spawned its own industry of vested interests in the medical profession, including psychiatry and psychology, the rehabilitation professions and the many other professions, some of them criminal, that ride on the coat tails of human injury and misery. Economic loss and dependent care amounts often grossly outstrip the entitlement, if any, to "non-economic loss", which used to be called "pain and suffering", an expression most lay people understood.

1. In the present case, the plaintiff's injuries do not entitle him to damages for pain and suffering because they do not meet the statutory threshold. Notwithstanding that, there is a claim for economic loss in the order of $580,000 and for dependent care services in the order of $350,000 plus past and future medical expenses of $200,000. The defendant's assessment of the value of this claim at its highest is $315,000 so that the plaintiff's figure was inevitably going to be a bridge too far.

1. When any court is asked to give a judgement in regard to such large sums of money the expectation is that a concerted effort would be made to establish the plaintiff's entitlement or disentitlement to it and that the arguments, in favour of or against, presented in a logical, clear and understandable manner and not on hastily scribbled pieces of A4 which tends to suggest that the first real attention paid to such a serious issue was dependent on how the case panned out before the…