Schmidt and Peart Law
Accident compensation law specialists
Click on the judgment name to read the full text of some of our significant cases
This Court of Appeal case determined that pregnancy can be an "injury" for ACC purposes where the mother lost an opportunity to terminate the pregnancy due to a failure to detect a serious fetal abnormality on an antenatal scan. The judgment includes a significant discussion of the treatment injury regime.
Prior to Jones, the standing District Court ruling was that injured persons who returned to work could not be considered incapacitated. The High Court determined, however, that there are some people who "soldier on" at work despite the fact that they are medically unfit to return to their pre-accident employment.
Knox is an important High Court case in the context of the complex statutory test for work-related gradual process injury. It clarified the meaning of "significantly greater" risk of suffering the personal injury (s 30(2)(c) of the Act).
This is an important case under the Accident Compensation Act 1982. The Appeal Authority determined that IRD records were not required if other evidence allowed ACC to reliably estimate a person's pre-accident earnings.
In this complex birth injury case the Court accepted that the treatment decision to proceed with a "natural" delivery (as opposed to a caesarean section) was causative of the hypoxic brain injury suffered by the baby because had there been a caesarean delivery, the severe shoulder dystocia problems that caused the brain injury could have been “bypassed”.