Times Best Law Firm Spotlight: Clinical Negligence

In the third of our Times Best Law Firm Spotlight interviews, we focus on Clinical Negligence with Partner Tim Hodgetts.

What has made this such a successful year for your practice?

It’s been a successful year for a variety of reasons – we’ve always had real strength in depth across the country, but this year we’ve been able to add to that by developing a new team from our Leeds office serving clients in Yorkshire and the North of England. That’s been a success this year that we’ve been really pleased to move forward with.

We’ve also focused on increasing our use of alternative dispute resolution, which has been a really positive experience for members of the team that have engaged in this. Of course, there are a small number of cases that need to be resolved at trial and we’ve also had a number of very successful trial wins. All in all, that’s made it a very strong year for our Clinical Negligence practice.

What types of projects have you worked on over the last 12 months?

As ever, our work arises from claims involving medical treatment across a range of settings in both the NHS and independent health sector.  

What do you think are the opportunities and challenges faced by this market over the next 12 months?

Our market focus is on both the NHS and private providers: the pandemic has had a huge effect across both markets. The clinicians who are at the sharp end of getting the NHS and the country through the pandemic are the witnesses and experts involved in the claims that we need to investigate and resolve. We are very mindful of the need to allow clinicians to get on with their key frontline responsibilities.

Management of the pandemic is clearly having a significant effect on regular health activity and particularly on elective care. Hopefully health outcomes will not be significantly affected in the longer term, but clearly there are some worrying indicators and it may be some years before we know what the full effects have been.

What do you hope to achieve as a team over the next 12 months?

The next 12 months will be another challenging time for the NHS and those providers that are supporting the NHS in the delivery of elective services. We can only play our part by making sure that the way in which we manage claims and engage with clinicians and clients in no way distracts from the delivery of frontline healthcare services.

For our team, we would like to continue to grow and develop across the country. We would also like to develop our capacity for data analysis to drive greater efficiency for our clients.