AXA tried to brand an injured man dishonest to defeat his claim. On June 5, 2026, the High Court refused.
The case goes back to a road accident on July 11, 2018, on a residential street in Barnoldswick. David Maher was standing beside his parked work van, door partly open, when a pickup driven by AXA's insured, Mr Grogan, came down the street and trapped him between the van and the vehicle. The trial judge found Grogan caused the crash, and that was never in dispute on appeal.
The fight was about the injury. The County Court awarded Maher £3,609.83 plus costs - far below the £50,000 to £70,000 he had claimed. The judge accepted Maher had several months of left hand, arm, shoulder and neck pain, but found that worse neck and shoulder symptoms from late 2018 were not down to the accident.
AXA appealed anyway, and not to cut the payout - it never challenged the amount. The insurer wanted Maher declared "fundamentally dishonest" under section 57 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, a finding that can sink a whole claim, even a real one. To get there, AXA needed two wins: that the judge was wrong to find any early neck and shoulder pain, and that Maher had lied about it.
AXA's case rested on an absence. None of the early paperwork - the A&E notes from July 12, 2018, the GP records, the claim form, a police statement, a specialist's report - mentioned neck or shoulder pain. If the pain were real, AXA argued, Maher would have flagged it. Its KC called the judge's conclusion "absurd" and "nonsense."
Mr Justice Mansfield disagreed. An appeal like this is a review, not a retrial, he said, and overturning a trial judge's findings of fact is a high bar - the finding has to be "plainly wrong." The trial judge had seen the witnesses; Mansfield had not, and was not even handed a transcript of Maher's evidence.
On the missing paperwork, he made a point that should land with any claims professional who relies on the early record. He cautioned against "slavish adherence to the documentary record," adding that documents "are very often the best guide to the true facts; but they are not necessarily so." A gap raises questions rather than answering them - here, the pain may simply have gone unrecorded because the hand and arm were the pressing problem. The trial judge had accepted that, supported by Maher's expert, Mr Mohammed.
AXA also said the way the accident happened could not have caused neck and shoulder pain, and that Maher gave a false account of "bending inside the vehicle" to explain his symptoms. Mansfield rejected both. Whether the crash could cause that pain was a medical question, and AXA's own expert was never asked whether the facts as found could have done so. Its KC accepted there was no medical evidence ruling it out.
On dishonesty, the trial judge had found that even if he were wrong about the early pain, Maher genuinely believed he had it - so he was not dishonest under section 57. Mansfield agreed that was open to the judge, noting the medical history was complicated and that placing pain on a timeline stretching back more than a year is not easy.
He dismissed the appeal.
The takeaway for insurers is blunt. A thin paper trail is not a fundamental dishonesty case by itself, and appeal courts will rarely second-guess a trial judge who heard the witnesses. Section 57 demands proof of dishonesty, not just a gap in the notes - and when a claimant truly believes their own account, that door shuts.
