When someone is harmed in a hospital or a surgeon’s rooms, the physical injury is only the beginning. Then comes everything else: being told it’s normal, being treated as though you’re exaggerating, asking questions that never get a straight answer, and watching an institution close ranks around the people who hurt you.

I see that second injury in almost every person who contacts me. It’s often the part that stays with them longest.

For me, justice means repairing both. It means a real explanation of what happened. It means accountability, from the person or the system responsible. And it means compensation that reflects what has actually been lost: health, work, time, relationships, and the life someone expected to have.

People rarely come to me for the money first. They come because they want to know what happened, they want to be believed, and they don’t want it to happen to anyone else.

My doctorate in law looked at patterns of failure in medical negligence: how and why patients come to be harmed, why the same kinds of harm happen again and again, and why accountability so rarely follows.

That research changed how I see patient harm. Harm is rarely one person’s bad day. Much more often, it’s the product of patterns: decisions repeated across many patients, warning signs that weren’t acted on, gaps in regulation, and systems that make it easy for responsibility to disappear.

Once you see harm that way, you can investigate it that way. That idea sits at the centre of everything I now do.

I’ve been in practice since 2013, and in that time I’ve worked on many hundreds of claims. Today I’m Of Counsel at Peter Evans & Associates in Newcastle, where my work is focused on medical negligence: birth trauma, oral and maxillofacial and dental injury, cosmetic surgery, delayed diagnosis, and surgical and neurosurgical harm.

I’ve found that my clients are best served by a close-knit team who know every file, working hand in hand with trusted barristers and senior counsel. Clients don’t get passed down a chain. They know who is working on their case, and so do I.

That’s also where the name Reframe Legal comes from. I look at a medical injury as a system to be investigated, not a dispute to react to. Who made which decisions, and when? What should have happened instead? Where did the system let the patient down? Answering those questions early brings clarity, and usually a stronger path to resolution.

I’m not medically qualified, and I don’t pretend to be. I work closely with independent medical experts, and my job is to ask them the right questions and build the evidence into a clear, credible story.

Compensation can’t undo an injury. So I spend part of my time on the other side of the problem: helping the people who deliver care, and the people who will regulate and litigate it, understand what goes wrong and why.

I teach Health Law at the University of Newcastle’s School of Law and Justice, working with the next generation of lawyers on consent, negligence and patient rights, and returned to teach again in Semester 2, 2026. With the Maternity Consumer Network, I’ve delivered “Better Births with Consent” training to maternity clinicians, including in regional Queensland, because so much birth trauma begins with a conversation about consent that didn’t happen properly.

I also speak with doctors and practice owners about patient safety and accountability, including on the Business for Doctors podcast and Surgery’s Dark Side, and at BFD25. Better care for patients and fairer outcomes when things go wrong are two sides of the same goal.

I live and work in Newcastle with my partner and our young daughter. Being a mother has changed how I hear the stories families bring to me, especially parents whose births or babies were harmed. I understand, in a way I didn’t before, what it means to hand someone you love into another person’s care, and to trust that they’ll be safe.

Outside the law, I have a long-held love of fashion design. Clothes, like cases, are about structure, detail and the person at the centre of them.

I care deeply about this work, and I also believe the best advocates are people with full lives to return to. That balance is what lets me stay steady for my clients through the long, hard middle of a claim.