High Court Justice Anne Hinton has found that former student Jesse Liu was the victim of two "vicious assaults" by another student, and that his jaw was broken in the second assault.
"What happened to Mr Liu was horrifying," she said in a judgment dated January 31 this year.
But she turned down a long-running appeal by Liu and his parents seeking $50,000 in damages against their original lawyer, Derek Cutting, which they lodged on the basis that Cutting had done and commissioned work on the case that they had not authorised.
Auckland Grammar offered the family $20,000 to settle their claim against the school, but by December 2008 the family had already paid $20,000 in legal fees and owed a further $15,125.82.
The final settlement between the school and the family was confidential, but Justice Hinton said: "As they presumably settled for at least $20,000, they also did well in terms of the dollar payment, compared with what many might have predicted for such a case."
