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Personal Injury Quantum Database (Qld)

A structured research database of 258 Queensland personal injury judgments since 2020. Updated continuously by Roche Legal. Free to search.

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Showing 2 cases. Procedural decisions hidden, tick "Include procedural decisions" above to show them.

Injury category
Carmichael v Welch & Anor
[2020] QSC 210 Trial

The court found the plaintiff had not established that her injuries were caused by the first defendant's negligence, accepting that the defendant's vehicle did not enter the plaintiff's…

 Community & Personal Service Worker Neurological, Hand / wrist, Knee / lower leg +1 MAIA Motor Accident 27 $0
Towers v Hevilift Ltd (No 2)
[2020] QSC 77 Damages assessment

Following an earlier trial establishing liability, the court assessed quantum for a helicopter pilot rendered an incomplete quadriplegic. Judgment was entered for the plaintiff for $5,652,072.74, with the…

 Technician / Trade Worker Neurological, Cervical spine Other 55 $5,652,073

Looking for a specific case? Browse the full case index →, every case in the database on one page, grouped by year.

📑 Cite this database (AGLC4)

Roche Legal, Queensland Personal Injury Quantum Database (Web Database, 2026) <https://rochelegal.com.au/quantum-database/>

Use this citation when referring to the resource itself (e.g. in academic articles, annual reports, or media commentary). For a specific case, see the citation block on its individual page.

Insights

What is the average award of damages? How often does a defendant completely defeat a claim? Do lawyers really increase a plaintiff’s chances in court? Find out what the data tells us…

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Case Schematics

How did the injury actually happen? What did the judge find went wrong? Each case is drawn as a simple diagram showing the incident and the three findings it turned on. Filter by claim type and outcome…

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How this database was built

The dataset draws from published Queensland court judgments from 2020 onwards across the Queensland Court of Appeal, Supreme Court, District Court, Industrial Relations Commission, and tribunals that hear personal-injury matters. Judgments are sourced from publicly available court databases, read against their source PDFs, and entered into a structured database where each case carries its case name, citation, court, year, claim framework, proceeding type, plaintiff age, occupation, outcome, recovery figure, heads-of-damage breakdown, and key procedural attributes.

Sort by plaintiff age, injury, quantum, claim type, and plaintiff outcome. Built from public judgments by Roche Legal for practitioners and prospective claimants.

Queensland Judgments and AustLII give you the judgments. This database gives you the data.

Queensland Judgments publishes the full text of court judgments as PDF and HTML. It is the primary, authoritative source for Queensland law, and this database wouldn’t exist without it. Every case here links back to the original judgment on the publisher’s website. If you want to read the judgment itself, that’s where you go.

What this database adds is structure. A Queensland personal injury judgment contains the same recurring information: who sued whom, under what statutory regime, what injuries were sustained, what the plaintiff was awarded, and how that was apportioned across pain and suffering, economic loss, future care, and so on. The judgment makes those facts plain to a careful reader – but because they’re written in prose rather than tabulated, they aren’t comparable across cases. You can’t ask Queensland Judgments “what’s the median recovery for a lumbar-spine motor accident claim heard between 2022 and 2025?” – not because the answer isn’t in the data, but because the data isn’t structured to answer it.

This database extracts those recurring facts into consistent fields – claim type, proceeding type, outcome, total recovery, heads of damage, injury body regions, ISV and WPI percentages, plaintiff age and occupation, judge, court, and dozens more – and lets you filter and aggregate them. The result is a research tool that answers the questions claimants and lawyers actually ask.

Case schematics. A growing number of case pages carry an animated schematic, a drawing of how the incident happened with the three findings the case turned on set out beside it. Tap it and the incident plays through. It lets you grasp a case in seconds, before you read a word of the judgment. Like the rest of the database, it is free to use. Every schematic is on the case schematics page.

What’s in the database, and what isn’t. The database holds structured facts (citations, dates, amounts, courts, judges), short plain-language summaries written for this site, and the schematics drawn for it. It does not republish the judgments. The judgment text itself remains where it was published – on Queensland Judgments, AustLII, or the High Court of Australia – and is always one click away via the link on each case page if you need to check anything specific or more in depth.

A few limitations worth knowing:

  • Scope is Queensland personal injury only, from approximately 2020 onwards. Earlier judgments, other practice areas, and other states are not covered. For broader research, Queensland Judgments and AustLII remain essential.
  • Volume is smaller – hundreds of cases rather than the millions in the comprehensive databases – but every case is hand-curated, with consistent field extraction across the dataset.
  • Plain-language summaries are independent paraphrases, written specifically for this database rather than copied from the judgment. They are intended to convey the practical effect of the decision in accessible language.

Built and maintained by Roche Legal, a Queensland personal injury firm – the field choices reflect what practitioners and clients actually ask about, not what’s easy to extract. Think of this database as a layer of analysis built on top of the primary sources, not a replacement for them. It is most useful when you are trying to compare cases, calibrate expectations, or quickly understand what the data says about a particular type of claim without reading dozens of judgments in full.

Cases qualify if they engage one of the statutory frameworks under which most Queensland personal injury matters proceed:

MAIA – Motor Accident Insurance Act 1994 (Qld), covering compulsory third-party motor accident claims

WCRA Common Law – common-law claims for workplace injuries under the Workers’ Compensation and Rehabilitation Act 2003 (Qld), where injured workers sue an employer in negligence

WCRA Statutory – entitlement reviews of WorkCover Queensland decisions, typically heard at the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission

PIPA Public Liability – Personal Injuries Proceedings Act 2002 (Qld) (“PIPA”) personal injury claims for any non-employment, non-motor injuries

PIPA Medical Negligence – medical-negligence claims proceeding under PIPA

Hybrid (WCRA + PIPA) – most commonly labour-hire arrangements where one defendant is sued as the employer under WCRA and another as host or principal under PIPA

Historical Abuse – institutional and historical-abuse claims, typically arising from conduct decades before the proceeding

Where a matter doesn’t fit any named framework but is genuinely a PI claim, it’s tagged “Other”.

The plaintiff’s outcome – Successful, Partial, Unsuccessful – is always recorded from the injured party’s perspective at the end of the judgment in question, regardless of who appealed:

  • A defendant’s appeal that fails (leaving the plaintiff’s trial award intact) is recorded as Successful – the client retained their recovery.
  • A plaintiff’s appeal for more damages that is dismissed but leaves the trial award standing is recorded as Partial – the client recovered, just not more than the trial gave them.
  • A defendant’s appeal that succeeds and reduces or sets aside the plaintiff’s recovery is recorded as Unsuccessful or Partial accordingly.

For appeals, we also record which party appealed – plaintiff, defendant, or both (cross-appeal). That separation matters when computing appeal success rates, because a defendant’s failed appeal looks identical from the outside to a plaintiff’s successful one (both read “appeal dismissed” in a case list) but means opposite things for the client.

The Queensland Personal Injury Quantum Database (rochelegal.com.au/quantum-database) is provided under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Personal and non-commercial professional use with attribution is permitted. Commercial use, redistribution, or republication (including via scraping or automated extraction) is not permitted without prior written consent.

Sean Roche, solicitor and director of Roche Legal

This database is actively maintained by Sean Roche, Director of Roche Legal. Roche Legal, is a Queensland personal injury firm based in Brisbane. The data on this page is provided as a public resource for journalists, researchers, practitioners and members of the public. Nothing on this page constitutes legal advice.

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