The company never bought the insurance the law required, and never showed up to fight the claim
A dancer left tetraplegic by a falling concert screen won HK$6.29 million on 15 June 2026, when Judge Phillis Loh assessed his compensation.
The award in Li Kai Yin v Studiodanz Company Limited follows what the court called a catastrophe. On 28 July 2022, while performing in the MIRROR.WE.ARE Live Concert 2022 at the Hong Kong Coliseum, Li Kai Yin was struck by a giant LED display panel that fell from height. He was 27 then and is 31 now, still in rehabilitative treatment, and was assessed as suffering a permanent 100 percent loss of earning capacity.
His employer, Studiodanz Company Limited, never took part. The company had already been convicted on 15 November 2023, on its own guilty plea, of failing to take out employees' compensation insurance to cover him, in breach of section 40(1) of the Employees' Compensation Ordinance. Liability was settled by an interlocutory judgment in July 2025, leaving only the size of the award. The employer entered no appearance and was absent from every hearing, conduct the judge said raised "a clear suspicion that R was evading service and, for that matter, liability." The court deemed service valid and pressed on without it.
Much of the case turned on how to value the earnings of a freelance performer who took cash and was also paid by cheque, PayMe and FPS across at least four studios with no fixed hours. Bank deposits in the year before the accident came to HK$763,884.64, or HK$63,657 a month. The dancer said his real earnings were higher because he spent some cash before banking it, but could not say how much. Declining the larger percentages used in other cases, the judge added a nominal 5 percent, fixing monthly earnings at HK$66,857.
The judge described his condition in plain terms, accepting that "He is incapable of ever leading or appreciating an independent adult life." On that footing she awarded the statutory maximum of HK$644,710 for the lifetime care he will need, accepting that his long life expectancy justified the full amount.
The compensation board's Form 7 had certified 34.7 months of sick leave to the assessment date. The judge held she was not bound by that figure, treating it as a snapshot, and used her discretion to extend the period to the statutory maximum of 36 months. She also ruled that statutory holidays should not be deducted from certified sick leave, finding nothing in the Ordinance that treats casual workers differently from salaried ones.
On the earnings question the judge invoked a time-honoured principle, that a court "does the best it can with what it has." The final tally: HK$3,417,600 for total incapacity, HK$644,710 for care, HK$1,975,209 for temporary incapacity over 36 months, and HK$254,400 in hospital expenses, totalling HK$6,291,919, with interest from the date of the accident and costs ordered against the employer.
The insurance the company was convicted of failing to buy would have answered that liability; without it, the full sum fell on the employer itself, and its absence from the proceedings did nothing to reduce it.
