Bermudian lawyer Denis DeFrias faces six-figure damages after losing his appeal to overturn a judgement which found him wholly to blame for an road accident which ended the career of a former exempt company boss.

New Yorker Ann Rooney was riding to work on Trimingham Road in April, 1995 when she suffered a head-on collision with a car driven by Mr. DeFrias, who was overtaking two tourists on mopeds.

Ms Rooney was a vice-president of fibre-optic company Nynex's Bermuda branch before she was hit by the car and suffered brain damage and went into a coma.

She has suffered from concentration loss and depression as a result of the accident and has struggled to hold down a job since.

Mr. DeFrias's appeal held that the trial judge got it wrong when she said the vehicles were only 75 yards apart when he began his manoeuvre and that his car was too far into her lane to stop her from panicking and that she had tried to avoid the collision.

The appeal also said that Ms Rooney should have been further over to her side because the rule of the road is to the left.

Mr. DeFrias, who works for Mello, Jones and Martin, was hoping to get the Appeal Court to find that Ms Rooney was 50 percent negligent to the accident.

But the Appeal Court, in a written judgement handed down on April 2, said that the position of Mr. DeFrias' car was decisive and that the trial judge was entitled to find that it was almost entirely in the wrong side of the road. The appeal judges said it was not surprising that Ms Rooney became so frightened she fell off as she attempted to squeeze through the gap between the car and the wall.

During the during the May 2000 civil court case Mr. DeFrias said that the road was clear when he'd began to overtake, and that Rooney had panicked and wobbled even though he had time to complete the manoeuvre.

DeFrias, of Mission Hill, Paget, has been given 21 days to contest the decision of the appeal judges to award costs of the appeal hearing to Ms Rooney.

A further hearing will then be held to decide the amount of damages to Ms Rooney, unless the parties decide a sum out of court which is likely to be substantial as Ms Rooney was was earning around $300,000 at the time of the accident.