Hilary Meredith Solicitors wins Outstanding Case of the Year at Personal Injury Awards 2025

After a 9-year David versus Goliath style legal action, Hilary Meredith Solicitors last night won Outstanding Case of the Year at the Personal Injury Awards 2025.

The award recognised the firm’s groundbreaking success on behalf of hundreds of UK armed forces personnel and veterans impacted by the anti-malarial drug Lariam.

Soon after Lariam was introduced to international markets in the late 1980s, users began reporting severe side effects. Over the following decades, as concerns grew about the drug’s association with serious psychiatric harm - including allegations of links to unexplained violence, homicide and suicide - the Ministry of Defence (MoD) continued prescribing Lariam to troops deployed to some of the world’s most dangerous environments.

After nine years of denials and delays by the MoD, Hilary Meredith Solicitors this year announced it had secured a settlement framework for hundreds of claimants, with each case assessed and valued individually with counsel’s advice.

Hilary Meredith Solicitors has a strong track record at the Personal Injury Awards. Founder and chair Hilary Meredith-Beckham is a three-time winner of the Claimant Lawyer of the Year accolade, and the firm was also shortlisted in the Claimant Team of the Year category at this year’s awards.

Commenting on the firm’s latest award win, Hilary Meredith-Beckham said:

“I have been representing members of our armed forces, veterans and their families for close to forty years, and this case is my proudest moment.

“We took on a defendant with unlimited resources and secured a life-changing settlement for hundreds of our clients.

“For nearly a decade, the MoD fought the brave men and women who served their country, despite being forced to admit that they made numerous failures in terms of risk assessments and warnings about the possible side effects of the drug.

“This case also proves that the MoD cannot simply adopt a ‘deny until they die’ approach to litigation. By dragging this out as long as possible, the MoD hoped many claimants would just drift away. They were wrong. They didn’t take into account the bravery of our clients or the passion and commitment of our outstanding team at Hilary Meredith Solicitors.”

Criticising the MoD’s approach throughout the case, Mrs Meredith-Beckham continued:

“This case should have been settled within five years. It was complex, involving the causal impact of the tablet on each individual soldier and, in fairness, we had the COVID years in the middle, but nine years is outrageous.

“As well as our clients, it is the taxpayer who pays the price when the defendant is a government body. An insurer would have acted commercially; the government, mainly a Conservative government throughout this case, avoided, prevaricated, hid and delayed.

“When there is such a need to support our damaged NHS, our care services, repair our roads, and fix education, housing and immigration, nine years to settle a case for the military, followed by months procrastinating over costs, is simply ridiculous.

“My view is that the handling of negligence cases against the MoD should be taken out of their hands and handed to an insurer, acting independently and with a commercial view to early settlement. The MoD used to instruct an external insurer and cases settled far quicker, with a reduction in legal costs.”

During the litigation, Mrs Meredith-Beckham and her team uncovered that only 5–10% of those who took Lariam had a corresponding entry in their medical records. As a result, medics were often unaware that the psychiatric symptoms they were treating may have been linked to the drug.

Lariam - developed within US military research programmes - was first licensed in 1989 and adopted by the UK military from 1991. Reported side effects range from confusion and anxiety to nightmares, depression, hallucinations and suicidal ideation.

In 2007, Dr Franz B. Humer, then chairman of Roche (the manufacturer), said more effective anti-malarials with better side-effect profiles were available and were generally being used.

A 2016 House of Commons Defence Select Committee report concluded Lariam should no longer be used except in exceptional circumstances. It noted that many soldiers had discarded their prescriptions for fear of the consequences and that the MoD had failed to follow the manufacturer’s guidance. The report criticised the MoD for a “lamentable failure” in its duty of care towards service personnel, and a number of suicides have been linked to the drug.

Mrs Meredith-Beckham said there are clear parallels between the Lariam litigation and the Post Office scandal. She also referenced the Hughes Report, published last year by England’s Patient Safety Commissioner Dr Henrietta Hughes, which criticised the adversarial nature of the legal system for those harmed by pelvic mesh and the medicine valproate.

She added:

“We took on an opponent with unlimited resources for nine long years. The MoD’s pockets, funded by the taxpayer, are much deeper than ours.

“A freedom of information request by my firm revealed they spend £20 million a year on legal costs defending claims from soldiers and veterans.

“The MoD is treating our soldiers like the enemy. They’re fighting cases they should be settling and putting our heroes through hell. They’re stubbornly defending claims and adopting aggressive and unnecessary stalling tactics.

“In reality, the MoD is defending its own mistakes and is unwilling to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The taxpayers’ money the MoD is wasting on legal costs would be better placed in the hands of those who need it most - our injured soldiers and veterans.”