Personal Injury Quantum Database

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

Search Year Claim type Injury category Damages Sort by

More filters 1

Court Occupation category Plaintiff age Proceeding type Plaintiff outcome Liability

Reset Include procedural decisions (interlocutory rulings, costs decisions, statutory reviews, non-substantive appeals)

Showing 21 cases. Page 1 of 4. Procedural decisions hidden — tick "Include procedural decisions" above to show them.

Case	Occupation category	Injury category	Claim type	Age at injury	Damages
Paetzold v At Beach Court Holiday Villas Pty Ltd [2024] QCA 227 Appeal The applicant sought leave to appeal the District Court's assessment of damages, contending the trial judge erred in finding his knee injury was not caused by the incident…	Labourer	Ankle / foot, Left foot, Left knee	WCRA Common Law	70	$41,077
Paetzold v At Beach Court Holiday Villas Pty Ltd [2024] QDC 35 Trial The court found the defendant employer negligent in failing to provide a mower with an operable battery, and that this caused the plaintiff's Achilles tendon injury. The claimed…	Labourer	Ankle / foot, Left ankle, Left knee	WCRA Common Law	~69	$41,077
Sneddon v Petts [2023] QDC 49 Trial Judgment was entered for the defendant. The court found no breach of duty — the plaintiff's pleaded 15-metre distance system was impractical, and the fall was not shown…	Labourer	Knee / lower leg, Right lower limb	WCRA Common Law	58	$0
Smart v Compass Group (Australia) Pty Ltd [2021] QDC 176 Trial The court found the plaintiff failed to prove any breach of the employer's modified statutory duty under s 305B WCRA, finding the unloading task gave rise to an…	Labourer	Knee / lower leg, Right knee	WCRA Common Law	55	$0
Goldthorpe v HJS Store Pty Limited [2025] QDC 209 Trial The plaintiff's claim was dismissed: the court found Harvey Norman had not breached its duty of care by providing a standard heavy-duty trolley and a medically cleared co-worker.…	Labourer	Lumbar spine, Thoracic spine	WCRA Common Law	~54	$0
Welsh v Biggin Pty Ltd (No 2) [2023] QSC 211 Trial Judgment for the plaintiff in the amount of $824,647.48. The court found the defendant employer breached its duty of care by failing to assess and instruct against the…	Labourer	Knee / lower leg, Right knee/quadriceps, Psychiatric	WCRA Common Law	~45	$824,647

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

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…

Learn More

How this database was built

The dataset draws from published Queensland court judgments from 2021 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, injuy, 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.

What’s in the database, and what isn’t. The database holds structured facts (citations, dates, amounts, courts, judges) and short plain-language summaries written for this site. 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 2021 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 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”) claims for 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.

Personal Injury Quantum Database (Qld)

Insights

How this database was built

Contact Us

Locations