|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Personal injury solicitors have helped a Wiltshire woman win the right to make a compensation claim after her husband died from an asbestos-related disease.
June Stephens, whose husband Jack died from asbestosis in March 2003, won special dispensation from a judge at Swindon County Court to pursue a damages claim against the insurers of her late husband's former employers.
Mr Stephens had worked as a ceiling fixer for Anderson, Firmin & Collins and had been employed to put up asbestos tiles in various shops and supermarkets.
He was initially diagnosed with asbestosis in 1997 but decided not to pursue a compensation claim because he believed his former employers had gone bankrupt and so there was no money with which to award him personal injury compensation.
Ten years later, however, his widow managed to track down the insurance company responsible for liabilities incurred by Anderson, Firmin & Collins and contacted personal injury solicitors to begin making an asbestos claim for compensation.
She then discovered that any personal injury claim had to be brought within three years of diagnosis and so it initially seemed that her compensation claim was unlikely to advance any further.
Her legal team refused to give up on the case, however, and Judge Nicholas Marston accepted that the three-year rule should be waived because of the exceptional circumstances of the case.
Mrs Stephens' personal injury solicitor, Brigitte Chandler, spoke to reporters following news that the compensation claim could proceed and said, "When I met Mrs Stephens I told her that even though the case might be legally out of time it was worth fighting for.
"It will be a very substantial claim."
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
