No serious lawyer can tell you "what your case is worth" at the first meeting. What can be explained precisely is the structure of the award: the heads of damage, what feeds each one, and the evidence each demands.
Why Structure, Not Numbers
Every award is the sum of distinct heads of damage, each with its own logic and its own evidence. Two claimants with the same injury can recover very different amounts because their lives, earnings and futures differ. So the useful first conversation is not a number: it is which heads your facts support, and what has to be gathered to prove each. The claim is built head by head, and the new procedure rules reflect exactly this structure: the pre-action letter itself distinguishes special from general damages and requires a schedule with supporting documents.
General Damages: What Cannot Be Counted
The first family covers what has no invoice. Pain and suffering: the physical pain and the mental suffering the injuries caused and will cause, a head the Supreme Court has confirmed extends to psychological harm. Loss of amenity: the permanent loss of the ability to enjoy activities, relationships and the ordinary functions of life. Disfigurement, where the injury changed appearance permanently.
These are assessed by the court, not calculated: the judge weighs the medical evidence and places the case against comparable decided cases. That is why the medical file and the honest, specific description of a changed daily life matter more here than anything else.
Special Damages: The Documented Past
The second family is arithmetic, up to the date of trial: medical, hospital and physiotherapy expenses; care that had to be paid for; net earnings actually lost while out of work, with benefits received brought into account; transport and the other real costs the injury caused. Every item lives or dies on its paperwork, receipts, payslips, employer letters, which is why we tell clients from day one: keep everything, and keep it organised. The procedure rules expect a schedule of these losses with the documents behind it.
The single most common way claimants lose money is not bad law but missing paper: the expense that was real, and unprovable.
That sentence is settled law, not caution. In Παναγή ν. Κακόψιτου (2001) 1 ΑΑΔ 839 the Supreme Court repeated that proof of special damages moves within strict limits and that it is for the claimant to prove with proper evidence each item said to make up the loss. The claimant there had paid social insurance for years, kept accounting books for his business and worked mainly with insurance companies, so the records existed; he produced none of them, his evidence was found general, vague, undocumented and unconvincing, and the claim for lost earnings failed. In the same case the separate award for loss of earning capacity was raised on appeal from £2,000 to £6,000 as manifestly inadequate, weighing his age, the nature of his work and a 15 per cent reduction of his capacity: the head that is assessed survived in the very case where the head that must be documented was lost.
Future Losses: The Head That Changes Lives
Where the injury reaches into the future, the award follows it. Future loss of earning capacity is assessed on the multiplier method the Cyprus courts apply in the English tradition: the annual net loss, multiplied by a factor reflecting the remaining working years, discounted for early receipt. The Supreme Court has recently upheld substantial awards on this basis in workplace injury cases. Future medical costs and future care, private treatment, aids, assistance the claimant can no longer provide for themselves, are separate heads with their own expert evidence.
Where the income evidence is too thin for that method, the head does not fall with it. In Κυμίσης (Ιπποδρομιακή Αρχή Κύπρου) ν. Κνέκνας, Civil Appeal 293/2016, decided on 4 February 2026, the Supreme Court upheld a lump sum for loss of earning capacity precisely because the evidence of the claimant's earnings did not allow the multiplier and multiplicand to be used, and restated the factors that fix the figure: the claimant's age, his occupational position and training, and the nature of his incapacity, with limited education an additional aggravating factor for future earning prospects, on the authority of Μαυροπετρή ν. Λουκά (1995) 1 Α.Α.Δ. 66. The employer's appeal against the amount was dismissed.
This is where serious injuries diverge from minor ones, and where expert evidence, medical, actuarial, occupational, earns its cost.
Interest, and the Two Great Reductions
Interest is awarded as a matter of law, not grace: on special damages it typically runs from the date of the accident, on general damages usually from the filing of the action, at the statutory rate in force. The two reductions to keep honestly in view: contributory negligence, which trims the award by the claimant's own share of fault, no seatbelt, no helmet, a risk knowingly run, and the duty to mitigate, because losses that reasonable treatment or a reasonable return to work would have avoided are not recovered.
Three provisions of the Civil Wrongs Law, Cap. 148 sit underneath those reductions and are worth naming, because each answers a question clients ask before they ask about figures. Section 57 is the contributory negligence rule: where a person suffers damage partly through their own fault and partly through another's, the claim is not defeated, and the damages are reduced to the extent the court thinks just having regard to that person's share in the responsibility. Section 65 works the other way and is regularly assumed to say the opposite: in computing damages no account is taken of any sum paid or payable under a contract of insurance in respect of the wrong, nor of any sum paid or payable by the Social Insurance Fund as a benefit or allowance in consequence of the same circumstances. Sick pay and insurance receipts do not come off the award.
Section 61(1) explains why the assessment has to be right the first time: a person who has received damages or another remedy for a civil wrong, and anyone claiming through them, receives no further damages for that wrong. There is one bite. That is the real argument against settling before the medical position is understood, and it is a rule rather than an opinion.
If you are weighing an offer from an insurer, tell us what the injury stopped you doing and whether the lost earnings and expenses are documented, at office@kleanthousplatis.com, or the enquiry form. We reply within one business day.
What Is Not Awarded
Cyprus courts compensate; they do not punish. There is no lottery multiplier for indignation, no award for the anger the accident caused, and exaggeration is not harmless: a claim caught inflating one head loses credibility on all of them. The realistic assessment, head by head, evidence by evidence, is what we prepare before proceedings are considered: see our pages on personal injury claims and, for the road-accident sequence specifically, the claim step by step.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who can claim when someone is killed?
Section 58(2) of Cap. 148 provides that the action is brought for the benefit of the deceased's dependants, and section 58(3) defines that widely: the spouse, any parent or other ascendant, anyone the deceased treated as a parent, any child or other descendant, a child of the family of any marriage the deceased was party to, and any brother, sister, uncle or aunt of the deceased or a child of any of them. Section 58(5) includes an unborn child.
Is there a separate award for bereavement?
Yes, and it is fixed rather than assessed. Section 58(7) allows the action to include a claim for damages for bereavement, section 58(8) confines it to the spouse and children or, failing them, to the parents on the terms it sets out, and section 58(9) fixes the sum, expressed in the consolidated text as GBP 10,000. Section 58(10) divides it equally where more than one person is entitled.
Who brings the action, and by when?
Section 58(11) requires the action to be brought by and in the name of the deceased's executor or administrator. Section 58(12) is the deadline that catches families out: where there is no executor or administrator, or where no action is brought by them within twelve months of the death, the action may be brought by and in the name of all or any of the persons for whose benefit it could have been brought. Section 58(13) allows only one action, so it has to be got right the first time.
Why will you not just tell me what my case is worth?
Because the honest answer at the start is a structure, not a figure. Once the medical position stabilises and the documents are in, a realistic range can be given, and it is built exactly the way the court will build it: head by head, against comparable cases.
The insurer's offer is one round number. How do I judge it?
By decomposition: what does it implicitly allocate to each head, and how does that compare with your evidence under each? A round number that cannot survive that exercise is an opening position, not a valuation.
Do I really need experts?
For the heads that reach into the future, effectively yes: future earnings and future care are proved, not asserted. For a modest claim that has healed fully, the medical file alone may carry it. The assessment tells you which case you have.
Related Reading
By Klitos Platis, Advocate. Klitos advises on litigation, corporate and commercial law, real estate, construction and energy at Kleanthous & Platis LLC in Nicosia.
This article is for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Laws and their application can change, and individual circumstances differ. For advice on your own matter, contact Klitos Platis at klitos@kleanthousplatis.com or telephone +357 22 680 330.
Klitos Platis
Advocate, Partner
Kleanthous & Platis LLC, Nicosia · Published 5 February 2026
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