Hodge Jones & Allen

Personal Injury

Riffat Yaqub is a Partner in the Personal Injury team, specialising in high-value claims involving spinal cord injury, brain damage and serious orthopaedic injuries resulting in amputations and fatalities. She is a hugely talented claimant personal injury solicitor with a calm, empathetic and measured approach who gets results.

Riffat is known for adopting a client-focussed, holistic approach whilst being committed and a fierce litigator. She is not afraid to take cases to trial when necessary. She acts for vulnerable clients and is a strong advocate for securing early rehabilitation, ensuring her clients can get their lives back on track as quickly as possible.

Throughout her career of 26 years, Riffat has developed a formidable reputation for consistently achieving strong results for her clients who have suffered serious life changing injuries arising from road traffic accidents, workplace accidents, accidents in public places and medical accidents. She is dedicated to her clients’ wellbeing to meet their every care, treatment need and secure their future financially.

Riffat works effectively with case managers, medics and professionals to achieve the right outcome.

Riffat has pursued a number of high-profile cases involving foreign nationals who have been injured in the UK, including a Ukrainian national injured in a workplace accident, three UAE nationals who were viciously attacked whilst staying at a London hotel and a French national who suffered devastating life-changing injuries after being thrown from a viewing gallery.

Riffat has set up what is perhaps the first community based neuro rehabilitation package for her brain injured client in Ukraine where there is a complete dearth of brain injury services. When war broke out, Riffat was determined to help her client, to return to the UK and worked tirelessly to get UK authorities to grant visas to her client, his family, and his Ukrainian based community rehabilitation team.

Whilst running her complex catastrophic caseload, Riffat also leads and co-ordinates support work with CBIT. Attending meetings with caseworkers, events and fundraising. Riffat is a confident public speaker and regularly presents on HJA’s London Legal Podcast and Facebook Live sessions with CBIT and other groups. Riffat works closely with junior HJA colleagues to provide mentoring and coaching.

Riffat works closely with charities including CBIT, Brake, Headway and others.

Work Highlights
Impressive successes, over last twelve months, include:

• French national (Tate Modern). Widely reported event – Claimant thrown over viewing terrace resulting in catastrophic injuries. Involved three potential defendants who all deny liability. Riffat works with French lawyers. Supports her client with ongoing complex rehabilitation for this multi-million pound case.

• Swedish National knocked down by a car when visiting London suffered catastrophic injuries. Riffat’s client was incompletely tetraplegic, doubly incontinent, dependent on constant care. Liability disputed throughout. Riffat engaged Swedish solicitor and replaced Guardian when it became apparent they were not acting in her client’s best interests. Settlement: £2.85 million.

• Cambridge undergraduate suffered serious injury when knocked off her bicycle. Working collaboratively with the defendant, Riffat employed a Case manager and put together an intensive rehabilitation programme to support Claimant both mentally and physically, to help re-build her confidence, strength and resilience. Settlement: £2.25 million.

PROFESSIONAL TESTIMONIALS

Dr Jackson, Clinical Neuropsychologist
“Without reservation You -Riffat have been outstanding in such unusual and challenging circumstances, with unselfishness, resilience and humanitarianism. It has been a pleasure to work with you, being creative in providing an effective rehabilitation programme partly remotely in the Ukraine. After the onset of war, you were unnerving in finding the best way to arrange the evacuation of your severely brain injured client and his family to the UK. In my 30 years of medico-legal work I have rarely seen a solicitor with such concern for their clients and the capacity to work so insightfully with the Neuro-rehabilitation services.”

Dr Mark Holloway, Senior Brain Injury Case Manager
“Throughout the whole process Riffat has sought to understand the complexities faced, she has been a committed advocate for her client and his family, and, whilst rightly holding us all to account, has recognised just how difficult this has been. She has liaised collegiately and robustly with her defendant counterpart and has ensured we have a shared vision of what we aim to achieve”.

William Latimer-Sayer QC, Cloisters
“Riffat cleverly negotiated with the Defendant’s representatives to make further payments under the Rehab Code, which therefore are not subject to the contributory negligence discount.
Her dedication and commitment to the client has been truly inspirational, and we are now working to secure the necessary expert evidence to quantify and resolve the claim.”

Beth Bartlett, Clinical Manager, Harrison Associates
“I worked with Riffat on the case of a young woman who sustained life changing injury to her upper limb. Whilst her tenacity and resilience helped maximise her rehabilitation and recovery potential, having an equally tenacious and resilient solicitor fighting her corner was just as important: Riffat really supported both her client and me as the case manager enabling the young lady to access rehabilitation tailored to her needs, as expediently as possible. Riffat has a terrific manner, is very innovative, calm, emphatic, caring and an extremely bright capable lawyer who is very client focussed. Working so collaboratively with Riffat made the whole rehabilitation process so much easier, not to mention such a pleasure!”

Graham Lynch, Defendant Solicitor
Riffat adopted a pragmatic and collaborative approach throughout the process including early notification of the claim, dialogue in relation to liability resolution, rehabilitation, quantum evidence and overall settlement. Throughout I found Riffat to be a, pragmatic, skilled negotiator. She was a formidable opponent, very determined, who clearly cared for her client. Riffat was very approachable, highly experienced litigator”.

Trained at IBB; qualified 1996; Edwards Duthie Solicitor 1997 and Partner 2004 to December 2015; Partner Hodge Jones & Allen 2016

Law Society Personal Injury Accreditation Scheme Accredited Senior Litigator of Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL)