Injury lawyer details for Paul Balen

About Paul Balen

Paul graduated with a first in law at Peterhouse, Cambridge.  He qualified as a solicitor in 1977 and became a partner in what is now Freeths in 1980. He is now a Consultant.

A Past President of both the Nottinghamshire Law and the Nottinghamshire Medico-legal Societies in 2000 he was appointed one of the first three Senior Fellows of the APIL. He  was national secretary and an executive committee member of APIL between 1998 and 2000.

He is an accredited APIL clinical negligence specialist. He also specialises in clinical  personal injury and product liability cases and is well known as a co-ordinator of multi-party actions and the creative use of settlement schemes.  He successfully negotiated compensation schemes following the claims brought by the parents of the victims of Beverley Allitt; patients who had received 3M and ABG hip prostheses; women who had received Trilucent and Hydrogel breast implants, women who received faulty cervical smear results and children who had wrongly been diagnosed with and treated for epilepsy. Paul currently serves on the steering committee for the PIP Breast implants Group Action and devised a claims handling agreement for the injured patients of maxillofacial surgeons in Staffordand Leicester. He is the lead solicitor for claims arising from contaminated heater cooler units which caused mycobacterium chimaera infection in heart valve patients.

Paul also specialises in the representation of bereaved relatives at inquests and in advising on reputation management and defamation cases some cases.

Building on his creation of successful alternative dispute settlement schemes in his historical specialist area of clinical negligence, personal injury and product liability Paul has developed into a successful mediator.  He frequently adopts mediation as the route to resolution of his own cases. Paul is an ADR accredited mediator, a Director of Trust Mediation and a member of the Sport Resolutions, Association of Midlands Mediators and Clerksroom Specialist mediation panels.

He is General Editor of Clinical Negligence published by LexisNexis for APIL the third edition of which was published at the end of 2018 and which includes chapters he has written on Inquests and on ADR..