B.C. Supreme Court awards lawyer about $6 million for future loss of income after nightclub fall

The B.C. Supreme Court has awarded almost $6 million to a woman who suffered a mild brain injury during a fall on the dance floor of a nightclub.
Michelle Danicek is a lawyer who was involved in two separate incidents – a fall in a nightclub in April 2001 and a subsequent motor vehicle accident in 2002. The woman’s claims for both were subsumed into a single action.
Danicek argued the injuries she sustained in the 2002 motor vehicle accident had prevented her from recovering fully from the concussion-like symptoms she suffered after hitting her head during a fall on the dance floor of Bar None.
The Bar None incident happened following an associates’ dinner organized by her law firm Alexander Holburn Beadin & Lang at Rodney’s Oyster House in Vancouver.
Danicek, an articling student at the time, went to the Bar None club with the defendant in the action, Jeremy Martion Poole. Both Danicek and Poole had been drinking.
On the dance floor, Poole fell backwards on top of Danicek, causing her head to hit the floor.
Danicek subsequently reported suffering headaches, nausea and vomiting. She indicated to a variety of medical specialists that the headaches never went away, ultimately causing her to quit her work as a lawyer.
The court ruled the dance club incident and the motor vehicle accident were divisible from each other.
The court found her reports of pain following the two incidents were inconsistent. In contrast to what Danicek claimed in court, the court found that her headache symptoms, which caused her to quit her vocation, were not on a trajectory towards recovery before she was injured in the auto collision.
Assuming Danicek became a partner of the firm in 2008 (which was her career trajectory before the dance club incident), and assuming an earning of $492,000 per year, the court found her future lost income as a result of the dance floor incident was just over $5.5 million.
Total damages, including only $10,595 from the motor vehicle accident, amounted to more than $5.9 million.