People Details - Richard Scorer

Richard is a Partner and Head of the Personal Injury Department at Pannone LLP.

Richard specialises in Personal Injury compensation cases including head and spinal injury cases, child abuse cases, claims on behalf of military service personnel and human rights cases. Richard is named as a ‘Leader in the field‘ of personal injury in Chambers 2010 legal directory.

Richard has won numerous multi-million pound awards for victims of serious head, spinal and amputation injuries (for example a recent award of £5.5 million to a 27 year old man with a serious brain injury following a road accident) and has acted in many landmark cases particularly for victims of child abuse and injured military personnel including:

• GR –v- Wirral MBC – Court of Appeal 2009. This case strengthened the rights of child abuse victims to bring cases “out of time”.

•New –v- Ministry of Defence: the first ever award of damages to a soldier for the MOD’s failure to diagnose and treat post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

•Michael Hill cases: Richard acted for clients abused by Catholic priest Father Michael Hill. These cases led directly to root-and-branch reforms of the Catholic Church’s child protection procedures, including the “Nolan” reforms and the Catholic Office of Child Protection (COPCA).

•Budden –v- Police Aviation Services: successful damages claim by the widow of the pilot killed in the Kent air ambulance helicopter crash, despite the precise cause of the accident being unknown.

Richard is a Fellow of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL), a member of the Solicitors Regulation Authority Personal Injury Accreditation Scheme (Law Society Personal Injury Panel) and the Legal Services Commission North West Area Funding Review Committee.

He is the co-author (with Elizabeth-Anne Gumbel QC and Malcolm Johnson) of the book ‘Child Abuse Compensation Claims’ (Law Society Publications 2002), a contributor to ‘Personal Injury: Law, Practice and Precedents’ (APIL/Jordans 2005) and has had numerous articles published in the legal press.

Richard has appeared on radio and TV in relation to many of his personal injury cases, including BBC and ITV National news, ‘Newsnight’, Radio 4 ‘Today’ and ‘PM’ programs, Radio 4’s ‘Law in Action’ and international media. Richard qualified as a solicitor with Pannone in 1994 and became a Partner in 1998 and Head of Personal Injury in 2009. Richard Scorer writes a regular column about personal injury law in New Law Journal. You can read some of these articles here.

Richard is a trustee of the Lifeline Project, a national charity dedicated to supporting individuals, families and communities affected by drugs and alcohol.