For each case contained in our Quantum Database we extract the quantum awarded under each head of damage, the ISV assessment, apportionment between defendants, contributory negligence findings, and contribution orders.
The result of our case summaries sit between a case digest and a structured dataset – searchable by typical court library categories and filters, but also by plaintiff characterisitcs such as their occupation, age, primary injury, damages awarded and their overall outcome.
This page is the result of cataloguing every Queensland personal injury court judgment we could find from 2021 onwards. It’s a working dataset with each case summary being personally reviewed by Roche Legal.
New judgments are added periodically and the widgets below show what we’ve learned from it. The widgets are free to use for academic and journalistic purposes.
The methodology section explains how the dataset was built, what it includes, what it excludes, and what its limitations are.
For public interest, we also map Queensland’s worst crash black spots by suburb, built from the Queensland Government’s open road crash data – the Queensland Road Danger Map.
How much do injured plaintiffs recover?
A median rather than an average is a more useful statistic in personal injury litigation. Personal injury damages are heavily skewed. A small number of catastrophic-injury matters at the top would dominate any average – and a median is what most readers actually want when they ask “what’s a typical award?”.
At first glance, this may seem like headline figure across the substantive judgments in the dataset.
You will notice that a large single outlier case can impact the ‘average’ award of damages, so we adopt the ‘median’ award instread.
However, when adopting a median, there is still a distinction worth making: self-represented litigants skew the data downwards.
Of the Queensland personal injury matters that reached a court judgment between 2021 and 2026, plaintiffs with legal representation recovered damages in the majority of cases. Self-represented plaintiffs chances of receiving an award of damages by the court was less than 50% – and when they did win, they took home a a much smaller award than represented plaintiffs.
That isn’t the most important fact about Queensland personal injury litigation. The most important fact is that the overwhelming majority of injury claims settle, never reach court, and produce no published judgment. But for the cases that do reach a judge, the gap between represented and self-represented outcomes is striking – and consistent enough across years, claim types, and case sizes to be worth taking seriously.
Breaking the median down by claim framework gives a clearer picture:
The order is fairly stable across years. MAIA motor accident claims sit at the lower end because they’re often relatively contained injuries with capped general-damages components. WCRA common-law and PIPA matters trend higher because they more often involve more serious injuries and stronger economic-loss claims. Medical negligence sits highest where it appears, but the sample is thin. To experienced personal injury practitioners, this is unsurprising as medical negligence cases are rare, complex, and expensive to run.
What are the most common types of injuries claimed?
Whilst claims for physical injuries dominate the landscape, psychiatric injuries are also very common and cause the most substantial damages to be awarded when successful. Cervical spine claims are typically from whiplash style injuries motor vehicle accidents. Lumbar spine and shoulder injuries generally arise from workplace incidents, and psychiatric claims arise from a mixed bag of causes but with the highest damages usually awarded as a result of the impact of historical sexual abuse.
What is the most significant head of damage in a claim?
What surprises non-lawyers most about the underlying numbers is how little of any award is for pain and suffering:
General damages (the legal term for compensation specifically for pain, suffering and loss of amenity) make up roughly 5% of all the damages awarded across the dataset. The bulk of compensation, around 60%, pays for past and future economic loss, i.e. the income an injured plaintiff has lost or will lose. Care costs and special damages fill out the remainder. This is the part of the data that most contradicts lay intuition about what a personal injury claim is worth, and it’s the structural reason two plaintiffs with similar injuries can recover wildly different amounts. The difference is usually their careers, not their suffering.
Which occupations are most common in personal injury court decisions?
Judges don’t always describe the same role the same way. We’ve reviewed the judgments and mapped the plaintiff occupations by to one of the eight OSCA Level 1 Major Groups (the ABS labour-statistics taxonomy that replaced ANZSCO in December 2024) so cases can be aggregated despite the free-text variation in judgments.
The most common occupations in court judgments are:
Should an injured plaintiff use a lawyer?
The qualitative finding is robust. Represented plaintiffs win more often and recover meaningfully more when they do.
Getting legal representation is not a marginal advantage. Across every year in our dataset, across the main claim frameworks, plaintiffs without legal representation are substantially less likely to walk away with an award damages. In fact, they are more likely to lose at trial all together.
The finding however isn’t exactly fair. Self-represented plaintiffs in court are not a random sample of plaintiffs. They’re more likely to be running matters that no firm would take on a no-win-no-fee basis. They’re more likely to be appearing against well-resourced institutional defendants. They’re more likely to have already exhausted other legal options. So part of the gap measures the difficulty of the cases themselves rather than the difficulty of running a case without a lawyer.
How long does a litigated claim take after injury?
Most personal injury claims resolve through negotiation within 12 to 18 months from commencing a proceeding, without ever reaching a trial. The widget below is about the minority of matters that don’t settle, and run all the way to judgment:
These are years from the date of the incident to the date of judgment, not from when proceedings were filed. The intervals are longer than people expect, and they’re longer for some claim types than others. PIPA Public Liability matters and WCRA common-law matters routinely take five to seven years from injury to judgment when contested all the way through.
Historical-abuse and institutional-abuse claims aren’t shown on this widget because the underlying conduct typically pre-dates proceedings by decades, which would distort the comparison with modern claim timelines. They’re recorded in the database and their substantive outcomes appear in the other widgets; the time-to-judgment question is just a different one for those matters.
How often do appeals succeed?
Substantive Queensland personal injury appeals over the period covered:
The “appellant’s perspective” framing matters here. A plaintiff’s appeal for more damages succeeds when they get more. A defendant’s appeal succeeds when the plaintiff’s recovery is reduced or set aside. So a defendant’s failed appeal which leaves the plaintiff’s trial award intact counts as a fail from the appellant’s perspective in this widget, even though it’s a win for the plaintiff.
The overall takeaways:
- Plaintiffs appeal more frequently than defendants. Plaintiff appeals rarely succeed.
- Defendants are twice as likely to succeed in an appeal than a defendant.
- Appellate courts are reluctant to disturb trial damages awards.
Another observation is that defendant appeals more often reduce damages than overturn liability entirely; and a meaningful fraction of appeals fall in the cross-appeal category, where both sides had something to gain or lose.
Using these widgets on your own site
Every widget on this page is embeddable. Drop a single line of HTML into any web page and the live data from this database renders inside it, updating automatically as new judgments are added. The widgets carry a small attribution link back to this page; no other attribution is required.
If you’re a journalist, academic, barrister, or student writing about Queensland personal injury law for a publication, a research paper, a submission, or a professional newsletter – please feel free to cite the data or embed the widgets. The data is freely available.
For specific extracts, custom analyses, or methodology questions, please get in touch.
Understanding the data
What’s included, what’s excluded
Included in the analytical statistics: substantive court judgments where damages were assessed or liability was finally determined. That means trials, damages assessments, and substantive appeals – including appeals where the appellate court varied the quantum.
Only cases from the Queensland District or Supreme Courts are included, as well as the Queensland Court of Appeal (and High Court of Australia where it relates to a prior Queensland decision).
Excluded from the analytical statistics:
- Settlements, because settlements aren’t published. The overwhelming majority of personal injury claims settle out of court without producing any judgment, so this dataset reflects only the subset that contested all the way to judgment. That’s a real selection effect: matters reaching judgment are different on average from matters that settle – often more difficult, more uncertain, more strongly defended. When we say a median is X in the data, we mean X for matters that reached a contested judgment, not X for personal injury claims generally.
- Procedural rulings that don’t determine damages – interlocutory orders on disclosure, security for costs, leave to appeal, or strike-outs that didn’t dispose of a case on the merits.
- Costs decisions following a substantive judgment.
- Duplicate records of the same matter. Where a matter produced both a trial judgment and an appellate judgment, only one record contributes to the statistics: the surviving record carries the operative final figure. Both judgments remain individually viewable in the database; the statistics avoid double-counting.
Spotted an error? Have a case we missed?
The database is built by hand from published judgments. Both the case-finding and the structured extraction inevitably have gaps and errors.
If you’re a researcher, practitioner, or court observer who notices a judgment we haven’t catalogued, or a misclassification in the data, please tell us.
The dataset gets stronger with each correction: data@rochelegal.com.au
This database is actively maintained by Sean Roche, Director of Roche Legal.
This database is maintained by Roche Legal, 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. If you have a personal injury matter you’d like to discuss confidentially, you can contact us directly.