Public Liability Lawyers in Sydney: No Win No Fee

Public liability is the type of compensation claim you make when you’re injured on someone else’s property or in a public space. It’s paid by the insurance that businesses, councils and property owners hold for exactly this situation.

Under the Civil Liability Act 2002 (NSW),^[1] a successful claim requires proving four things:

1. A duty of care existed: The owner or occupier of the property had a legal responsibility towards you.
2. The duty was breached: The property wasn’t kept reasonably safe, meaning a hazard existed and reasonable steps weren’t taken to deal with it.
3. The breach caused your injury: You were hurt because the property wasn’t kept safe.
4. You suffered loss: Whether that’s medical costs, lost income, ongoing care needs or pain and suffering.

You don’t need to be a paying customer or have a membership to claim — shoppers, tenants, gym members, visitors and passers-by are all covered, as long as the place wasn’t kept reasonably safe. That includes accidents at a friend’s or relative’s home, where a claim is usually covered by their home insurance, not out of their pocket.

You can also claim on behalf of someone who can’t act for themselves. Parents and guardians routinely run claims for injured children, and the same applies where an adult lacks capacity to manage their own affairs.

When someone dies from their injuries, a spouse or de facto partner, children, parents and siblings may be able to claim for the financial support and help around the home they’ve lost.

There are two main exceptions. If you were injured while working, workers compensation usually applies first, though you can sometimes also make a public liability claim against whoever owns or occupies the place where it happened. And if you were injured on the road, that’s generally a CTP claim instead. If you’re not sure which applies, tell us what happened and we’ll point you to the right claim.

• Slips, trips and falls: Wet floors, uneven surfaces, poor lighting, broken stairs — these are the claims we see most.
• Dog attacks: This includes bites, scratches, and being knocked down during an attack. Unlike other public liability claims, a dog owner is generally liable automatically — you don’t have to prove they did anything wrong. Narrow exceptions apply, such as where the dog was provoked.
• Injuries in public spaces: Parks, playgrounds and other council-managed areas. For footpath and road injuries specifically, councils have special protections: a successful claim often depends on proving the council already knew about the hazard.
• Food poisoning and burns: Contaminated food, scalding drinks and unsafe service at restaurants, cafes and venues.
• Falling objects: Stock falling from shelves, unsecured fittings and collapsing displays in supermarkets and retail stores.
• Assaults and inadequate security: Injuries at licensed venues, events or car parks where security should have stepped in.
• School and recreational injuries: Unsafe equipment, missing supervision, dangerous facilities. A school’s responsibility for its students can’t be handed off — it can apply even when the injury happened on an excursion run by an outside provider.
• Public transport injuries: A hazard at the station, interchange or wharf is a public liability claim; an injury involving the vehicle itself is more likely a CTP claim.

If your situation isn’t listed, you may still have a claim. Wherever you were hurt, the question is usually the same: did someone fail to take reasonable care for your safety?

Proving a public liability claim comes down to evidence, and most of it is held by the other side — which is why most people choose to work with a lawyer. Here’s how we build your case:

• Preserving the scene evidence: We put the owner or occupier (and their insurer) on written notice to preserve CCTV, incident reports and hazard records. Once that happens, the evidence can’t quietly disappear.
• Compelling the other side’s records: Cleaning schedules, inspection logs, maintenance histories and prior complaints — the documents that show whether anyone was actually keeping the place safe. Occupiers don’t volunteer these, but we can compel them to hand them over.
• Proving the injury was preventable: We gather witness accounts, staffing rosters, independent safety reports, and CCTV timestamps showing how long a hazard sat there. Together, these prove not only that there was a hazard, but that it should have been caught before you were hurt.
• Briefing independent medical experts: To establish how serious your injuries are and how long they’ll likely last, we work with a national network of independent doctors, physios and other medical professionals. This involves more than just finding the right expert — we brief them properly, so their report proves exactly what your claim needs.
• Proving your losses: We gather payslips, tax records and treatment plans, so the claim captures not only today’s lost income and bills, but the cost of your injury for years to come.

Two time limits apply to public liability claims in NSW,^[2] and your deadline is whichever runs out first:

1. The three-year rule

You generally have three years to start court proceedings, counted from when you knew — or reasonably should have known — three things:^[3]

1. That you were injured
2. That it happened because someone failed to take reasonable care for your safety, and
3. That the injury was serious enough to justify a claim.

For most people, the three years start on the date of the accident. But if your injury seemed minor at first or didn’t appear until later, the three years can start from then instead.

2. The 12-year long-stop

Whatever you knew and when you knew it, claims usually can’t be started more than 12 years after the incident. Courts can extend this only in limited circumstances.

Keep in mind, the time limit is the last day proceedings can be filed in court — but building a claim takes months of evidence-gathering and expert reports before that point, and the strongest evidence is often gone within weeks of the accident. So whatever the deadline allows, it’s always a good idea to start your claim as early as possible.

Exceptions to the time limit

• Children: If a child has a parent or guardian able to act for them, the three-year limit generally runs in the standard way. But if there’s no parent or guardian available, the time limit may pause until the child reaches 18.^[4]
• People without capacity: The time limit pauses if someone does not have the mental capacity to manage their claim, and there is no one to do it for them.^[4]
• Claims after a death: For family members claiming after a death, the three-year window begins no earlier than the date of death.^[5]
• Child abuse: There is no time limit for claims arising from abuse suffered as a child — these can be brought at any time, however long ago the abuse occurred.^[6]

If you think you might be close to a limit — or past one — don’t assume anything. It takes one call to find out where you stand.

You can claim both the income you’ve already lost and the income the injury will cost you in future — whether you’ve taken time off, dropped your hours, moved to lighter duties on less pay, or stopped working entirely.

If your injuries are serious, future lost income is usually the biggest part of your payout — and it’s based on your most likely career path without the injury, not on what you earned at the time you were hurt. This factors in things like pay rises, overtime and promotions,^[8] as well as lost superannuation.^[9] Two adjustments then apply: the total is discounted because you’re receiving future money now,^[10] and reduced — usually by around 15% — for the chance life might have taken a different path anyway, through unrelated illness, redundancy or the like.^[11]

If you’re self-employed, tax returns and business records can prove earnings where payslips can’t — and because the law compensates lost earning capacity, you can still claim even if you weren’t working when you were hurt.

One limit worth knowing: when calculating your lost income, the court must disregard any gross weekly earnings above three times the average weekly total earnings of all NSW employees^[12] — currently around $4,850 a week, or about $250,000 a year.^[13] Very high-income earners can’t recover lost earnings beyond that ceiling.

This part of a claim compensates you for things that can’t be shown on a receipt: pain caused by your injury, the loss of things you used to enjoy or do, and permanent scarring or disfigurement.

To receive pain and suffering compensation, your injuries must reach at least 15% of a ‘most extreme case’— the law’s benchmark for the worst injuries imaginable, like quadriplegia.^[14] Injuries with permanent consequences usually clear that line, while injuries you fully recover from are less likely to qualify.

Once you’re over the threshold, compensation doesn’t follow a straight line. An injury assessed at 15% of a most extreme case receives 1% of the maximum (about $8,000), but an injury assessed at 30% doesn’t just get double that — it receives 23% of the maximum, around $185,000. Only the most serious, permanent injuries approach the cap, currently $804,000 and adjusted every October.^[15]

The scale itself is set by law — each percentage corresponds to a fixed share of the maximum. What’s argued is where your injury sits on it. That assessment turns on medical evidence, and it’s common for your doctors and the insurer’s doctors to disagree about how serious your injuries are. A difference of just a few percentage points can shift your compensation by tens of thousands of dollars, which is why the medical evidence supporting your claim matters so much.

The reasonable costs of managing your injury can all be claimed, including hospital stays, surgery, medication, physiotherapy, rehabilitation, specialist treatment, and scans — so keep every receipt, invoice and referral.

Future treatment is also factored into your claim: further surgeries you may need, years of medication, ongoing physio, or equipment as you age. Because your payout is once and final, these costs must be fully accounted for before you settle your claim.

There are three kinds of care you may be able to claim, and each has its own rules.

1. Paid care

Cleaners, support workers, nurses, and other forms of paid care are compensated based on what you reasonably spend, so keep all receipts.

2. Unpaid help you receive at home

Your partner helping you shower, your sister doing the school runs, a neighbour cooking and cleaning. Two conditions apply:^[16]

• It must add up to at least six hours a week, for at least six consecutive months.
• You must reasonably need that help because of the injury. If your partner always did the cooking, that’s not claimable — but if they’ve only started because you can’t, it can be added to your claim.

3. Care you can no longer give to someone who depended on you

This covers what you used to do for a child, partner, parent or other household member that now goes undone. It’s a separate claim, with its own conditions:^[17]

• You must have been providing that care before the injury.
• The person who depended on you must be unable to do it themselves, because of their age or a physical or mental condition. If your teenagers could cook for themselves, that part won’t succeed — however many hours you used to do.
• But for the injury, you would have kept providing it for at least six hours a week for six consecutive months, and that help is still genuinely needed.

Both kinds of unpaid care are valued at commercial care rates, up to a maximum hourly rate set by law.^[16]

To make claiming simple, keep a record of who helps you, with what, and for how long — and of what you can no longer do for others.

You can also claim travel to and from appointments (including a per-kilometre rate when you drive yourself), plus parking, tolls, and incidentals like braces or aids.

Individually, these costs can seem too small to worry about, which is why they’re often overlooked — but over months or years they can add up to thousands of dollars, so keep every receipt.

Get medical attention and report the accident as soon as you can — those are the two that matter most, and a few simple steps after that can make a real difference to your claim.

1. See a doctor to document your injuries: Even if you got medical treatment at the scene, see a doctor to document your injuries. This is important even if you feel fine — adrenaline masks injuries, and some only surface days later. A prompt medical record links your injury to the accident, and your ongoing treatment records are what your claim is ultimately valued on.
2. Report it, and get it in writing: Tell the business, council or venue straight away and insist they complete a written incident report — then ask for a copy or photograph it. That report is their own record that the accident happened, which is hard to walk back later. If you were hurt at someone’s home, a quick text or email describing what happened creates the same dated record.
3. Photograph the hazard and any warning signs: The spill, the broken step, the poor lighting, plus the wider area — and whether there were warning signs, since their absence matters as much as their presence.
4. Get witness details: Get the names and phone numbers of anyone who saw the accident — in a public place, they’re strangers who’ll be difficult to trace later.
5. Keep everything: Hold on to damaged shoes or clothing, keep any receipts for costs you’ve had because of the injury, and write down exactly what happened while it’s fresh.
6. Get legal advice early: The sooner you speak to a lawyer, the more evidence survives. A lawyer knows what’s needed and can pursue what you can’t get yourself, such as CCTV recordings or internal records showing that the hazard was reported before.

Almost certainly not. Very few public liability claims reach a court hearing — and even where proceedings are filed, they usually settle before a judge is involved. The whole claim is typically resolved in writing and in negotiations between the lawyers, so you may never set foot in a courtroom or have to face the other side.

If a hearing does become necessary — usually because the other side denies responsibility or won’t offer a fair amount — that doesn’t mean your claim has failed. In fact, it often means the opposite: that your claim is worth holding out for.

Like the rest of your claim, we handle the entire process for you, including briefing an experienced barrister to present your case. And we’ll prepare you fully for any part you need to play.

You’re entitled to run a public liability claim yourself, but most people don’t — and for good reason. These claims turn on building detailed evidence of negligence and negotiating with an insurer, and without a lawyer, it’s an uneven contest.

The insurer on the other side handles these claims for a living and has every incentive to settle yours for as little as possible. In contrast, you’d be navigating a public liability claim for the first time, often while recovering. A lawyer can help you understand what your claim is genuinely worth, so a low offer gets recognised for what it is. They’ll also manage the strict time limits, and compel the evidence sitting in the other side’s files that you’d have no way to get yourself.

When people do go it alone, it’s often because they’re worried about legal fees — and that’s the part we can take off the table. Our lawyers work on a No Win No Fee basis, so there are no fees unless you win. Cost isn’t a reason to face an insurer by yourself.

The exception is a genuinely minor injury — one that healed quickly, with little treatment or time off work. A claim like that may be too small to be worth pursuing at all, whether alone or with a lawyer. If that’s your situation, we’ll tell you honestly rather than take it on.

Most public liability claims resolve within 12 to 18 months, though that’s a range rather than a promise — a straightforward claim with clear liability can be quicker, while a serious or disputed one can run to two or three years. A few things decide how long yours takes, including:

• Your medical recovery: We won’t push a claim to settlement until your injuries have stabilised — the point where your condition is settled enough to work out your future treatment and the true value of the claim. Settling before then usually means being under-compensated for what you’ll still be dealing with years later. How long stabilisation takes depends on your injury and its treatment.
• Liability disputes: If the insurer disputes fault, they’ll run their own investigation, obtain their own medical opinions, and challenge what they disagree with — that back-and-forth can add months.
• Court availability: If the insurer’s offers aren’t fair and the claim has to go to court, simply getting a hearing date can take a year or more. That’s outside our control, but we’ll keep pressuring the insurer to settle fairly throughout the wait.
• Claims for children or protected people: Where the injured person is a child or can’t manage their own affairs, a court must approve any settlement to make sure it’s fair — and a child’s claim is often held until their long-term recovery is clear, so they aren’t settled short. Here, the extra time is a safeguard doing its job.

Throughout, we manage everything and keep you updated. The best thing you can do to keep your claim moving is simple: attend all your medical appointments and let us know if your circumstances change.

A waiver doesn’t automatically end your claim — your rights depend on what it covered, how it was presented, and what actually caused your injury. That’s rarely clear from the document alone.

Under NSW law, a waiver does give real protection to providers of recreational activities, like gyms, adventure sports, and organised events.^[19] A properly worded warning or waiver you genuinely understood and agreed to can defeat a public liability claim. However, these protections have limits and providers frequently get them wrong.

A waiver or warning is much weaker, or no protection at all, where:

• Your injury came from something outside the activity’s ordinary risks, like faulty or badly maintained equipment, an unsafe venue, poor supervision.
• The provider was reckless or broke a safety law or regulation.
• The document itself was defective, with the warning buried in fine print, never properly explained, or too vague to warn you of the actual risk.

A signed waiver is a reason to get advice, not a reason to give up. If you were injured after signing one, it’s worth a free review before assuming you have no claim.

You can still claim even if you were partly at fault. In most cases, being partly responsible reduces your compensation rather than ending your claim — and importantly, insurers argue this far more often than courts accept it.

The argument is called ‘contributory negligence’: the insurer says you didn’t take reasonable care for your own safety, so your share of the blame should come off your compensation. For example, if you’re found 20% responsible, you’d receive 20% less compensation.

But the everyday versions of this argument are weaker than insurers make them sound. The test isn’t whether you could have avoided the hazard — it’s whether you took the care a reasonable person would have taken in your position, judged on what you knew at the time rather than with hindsight.^[20] A shopper isn’t expected to keep a perfect lookout on the floor ahead, and arguments that you were careless simply for glancing at shop displays, or for wearing ordinary footwear like thongs, frequently fail.

Alcohol and drugs are treated more harshly. If you were drunk or high enough that it affected your ability to look after yourself, you won’t be awarded anything at all — unless you can establish the injury would have happened anyway. And if you can, your compensation is still cut by at least 25%, and the court can go higher. The only way to avoid the cut entirely is to prove your intoxication played no part in what happened. Keep in mind, none of this applies if you didn’t get intoxicated by choice.^[21]

Being blamed isn’t the same as being at fault. How much responsibility, if any, sits with you is exactly what gets argued — and arguing it well is what we’re here for.

That’s common in public liability claims, and it usually works in your favour. Responsibility for a public place is often split — between the owner, the tenant running the business, the centre management, a cleaning or maintenance contractor, or a council. If several of them failed to keep you safe, they can all be liable.

You don’t have to sort out who owes what. Where two or more parties are responsible, you can generally recover your full compensation from any one of them — and it’s then up to that party to chase the others for their share. In NSW, this is known as ‘joint and several liability’.

The catch is that this only works if the claim is brought against the right parties from the start — name the wrong one, or leave one out, and you can miss out on your full compensation. You don’t need to do this on your own: we’ll work out exactly who’s responsible, even when everyone’s pointing at each other.

Yes, you can. Public liability claims include compensation for what the injury has cost you during recovery — so healing doesn’t erase your claim; it just affects how much it’s worth.

You can claim for financial losses regardless of how well you’ve recovered. This includes income lost while you were off work or on reduced hours, medical and rehab bills, paid or unpaid care, and travel costs. If you lost months of earnings, that alone can add up to a substantial claim.

A full recovery mainly affects two things. The first is future lost income, since an injury you’ve recovered from probably won’t affect your future earning capacity. The second is pain and suffering, which is only available if your injury is assessed at 15% or more of a ‘most extreme case’. That assessment is made once the injury has stabilised — the point where it’s unlikely to improve further with time or treatment — so an injury you bounced back from quickly may not reach the threshold.

Whether a healed injury is worth claiming for comes down to how serious it was and what it cost you. If the injury was minor and your losses were low, it may not make sense to claim — and we’ll tell you honestly if so.

Keep in mind: the time limit generally runs from your injury, not from when you recover — so don’t wait until you’re feeling better to check whether you have a claim.

Yes, at any stage — and it’s easier than most people expect. Your only job is to sign an authority with your new lawyers, and they take it from there.

Switching won’t cost you anything out of pocket. Your previous lawyers are entitled to be paid for the work they genuinely did — but that’s settled at the end of your claim, out of your compensation, and your new lawyers handle the whole arrangement.

Before you change lawyers, two things are worth considering. If a hearing or time limit is close, get advice before making the change — it may be better to wait until that deadline has passed. And be clear about what the issue is: a new lawyer solves poor communication or claim management, but can’t speed up the parts of the process no lawyer controls, like waiting for your injuries to stabilise or for a specialist appointment.

If you’re unsure whether a new lawyer can help, a second opinion will clarify your options — and it costs nothing to get one.

Yes, if it amounts to a recognised psychiatric condition, such as PTSD, an anxiety disorder or clinical depression.^[22] Distress, grief and anger on their own, however real, aren’t eligible for compensation.

The most common cases involve a psychological injury that develops alongside a physical one — you’re hurt in an accident, and depression or anxiety follows during a long recovery. But you can also claim for a psychological injury where there’s no physical injury at all: after an assault, for example, or a dog attack you escaped unharmed. These are treated as public liability claims and follow the same general principles set out above.

There are two scenarios where psychological injury claims work differently:

• You developed a psychological injury after witnessing someone being killed, injured or put in danger at the scene of an accident.
• You developed a psychological injury because a close family member — including a parent, partner, child or sibling — was killed, injured or put in danger by someone else’s negligence.

These are known as ‘nervous shock claims’. In the second case, you don’t need to have been there: a parent who develops a psychiatric illness after learning of their child’s death can claim even though they never saw it happen.

If you’re struggling after an accident, see your doctor or a mental health professional — that support matters in its own right, and the diagnosis and treatment records that follow are also the foundation of any claim. If you’re not sure whether your situation fits any of the above, a lawyer can usually tell you in a single conversation.

Yes — but the rules are different depending on where the accident happened.

For parks, playgrounds, pools and other council-run spaces, the claim works like any other public liability claim: the council is liable if it failed to take reasonable care, including where it should have known about a hazard.

Footpaths and roads are harder. For hazards like uneven pavement, potholes or broken kerbs that a council failed to fix, a special protection applies: the council is only liable if it actually knew about that particular risk — a court finding it merely ‘should have known’ isn’t enough.^[23]

Proving actual knowledge usually starts with the council’s own paperwork, including any resident complaints about the spot, inspection reports that logged the defect, or works lists where it sat awaiting repair. In Angel v Hawkesbury City Council, a council employee telling the injured woman the footpath had been earmarked for repair was enough to prove actual knowledge.^[24] While councils aren’t always forthcoming with their records, they can be compelled through formal access requests.

If you’re injured on a footpath, there are two things you can do to help your claim: photograph the hazard immediately — councils often repair a reported defect fast, which is good for the public and bad for your evidence — and report it in writing so there’s a dated record. Then get legal advice early, because whether a council had actual knowledge is a question that takes an investigation to answer, and that’s ours to run.

Almost always an insurer, not a person. Businesses, landlords, councils and event organisers carry public liability insurance for exactly this situation. So if what’s stopping you is the thought of making a claim against a small business or someone you know, they typically aren’t writing the cheque — their public liability insurer handles the claim, and the financial impact on an insured defendant is usually minimal.

The harder scenario is a defendant with no insurance. Public liability cover isn’t compulsory for most businesses, so occasionally the responsible party is uninsured. You can still claim against them personally — but whether that’s worth doing depends on whether they have the assets to pay your compensation. That’s why one of the first things we check is who stands behind your claim — which insurer, or what assets — so you know early whether it’s worth pursuing.

Yes, very possibly. When a lawyer says you don’t have a claim, that’s their judgment — not the last word.

There are several reasons a ‘no’ can come out differently after a second look:

• The lawyer was overly cautious: NSW law requires lawyers to certify that a claim has ‘reasonable prospects of success’ before running it, with personal consequences if they get it wrong.^[25] That encourages caution — and some lawyers overshoot, declining claims another firm would take on.
• The law has traps a non-specialist can miss: A claim can look unprovable to a lawyer less familiar with public liability law — like not realising dog attack claims don’t require proving negligence at all.
• Evidence may not have been found: A lawyer might not have chased all the available evidence before deciding, like the council inspection records that can establish a footpath claim.
• The facts may have changed: An assessment made before your injuries stabilised, or before CCTV and records were obtained, was a judgment about a different claim than the one that exists now.
• Firms have different capacity: Each firm weighs the complexity of your claim and the resources it needs differently — a claim declined as too complex by one firm may be exactly what another has the capacity to run.

With that many variables, a second opinion is worth getting. If we reach the same answer as the first lawyer, we’ll tell you — and explain why, which is often what the first ‘no’ came without.

Yes, when someone dies because of someone else’s negligence, the law recognises up to three claims for the family:

• A compensation to relatives claim: This compensates close family for the lost financial support and income the deceased provided, the help they gave around the home, and reasonable funeral costs, including a headstone.^[26]
• A nervous shock claim: For close family members who develop a diagnosed psychiatric condition due to the death. These are covered in more detail under ‘Can I claim for emotional or psychological harm?’.
• A claim by the estate: If your family member survived for a while before passing, their estate may claim the medical, hospital and care costs for that period, as well as their lost income up to the date of death.^[27]

Depending on your situation, you may have more than one of these claims at the same time.

A few things are worth knowing early: there’s generally one compensation to relatives claim per death, made on behalf of everyone entitled — including a spouse or partner, children, parents or siblings — with the compensation divided among them. And any life insurance or superannuation paid on the death is not deducted from the compensation.^[26]

These claims have their own time limits, so even if you’re not ready to decide anything, one early conversation protects the family’s position. It costs nothing, and there’s no pressure to take it further.