Well I guess it had to happen, we eventually caught up with the Partner of the The Injury Lawyers, Aman.
I asked him a few industry related questions and today we are going to publish Part 1 of the interview with an eye on next Friday for bringing the rest of the interview to you then.
What got you interested in Law and in particular Injury Law?
Because I couldn’t think of anything else to do! No, seriously, it sounds a cliche but it was the idea of being a Solicitor that appealed to me originally, particularly, the Court Room advocacy side of it.
Guess, I must have read too many Grisham novels & watched too many Legal Drama’s in my adolescent years. But what attracts me to it now is considering each case in meticulous detail, doing a proper case plan, negotiating with the other side and getting my client’s the absolute best deal.
What’s advice can you give to someone looking to make a claim, what should they at least expect when they contact a personal injury lawyer?
Make sure you go to an experienced Solicitor and ensure that your case is not run by an inexperienced claims handler. Many firms employ unqualified staff and give them the made up title of “litigation executive” when in actual fact anyone can call themselves a “litigation executive”.
Second, watch out for “3rd party capture”; we are finding that insurance companies are increasingly settling claims with injured victims directly and from experience these claims are settled very cheaply.
Thirdly, watch out for so called “legal cover” where your Insurance Company tells you that your legal fee’s are covered by them, when in reality your insurance company is actually just using the “legal cover” to sell on your claim to a firm and to profit from your injury.
There’s been a lot of noise made in the past few years that we are gripped in the clutches of a compensation culture. What is your response to all this?
That this a myth created by the media paid to do so by the insurance giants. As controversial and unbelievable as this may sound, I genuinely do not believe that we have a “compensation culture” – You simply can not claim unless you were injured as a result of someone else’s negligence or wrong doing and to say that we are gripped in the clutches of a compensation culture is simply not true.
How much has the industry changed since the government introduced regulations. Much, little or barely noticeable?
Which regulations? So many regulations and so many rules?! The introduction of Claims Management Regulation which was introduced to regulate Claims Management Companies which sell on claims to lawyers has cleaned up the market quite a bit, there is still work to be done – but the Regulators seem to be doing a good job.
Can you explain what is exactly a “No Win No Fee“? And why should a person looking to claim be interested in this option?
“No Win No Fee” means that we agree to waive our fee’s if we don’t win the claim.
American Injury Lawyers are well known for their marketing campaigns. Where do you feel the UK stands in this? Are UK Injury Lawyers still quite reserved when it comes to making the public aware of their right to claim?
In the last few years, we have on the whole made massive improvements in marketing our services but compared to the Americans, thankfully we are still pretty reserved. The marketing by the American Injury Lawyers is way out there and we are just not ready for that nor should we be.
We mentioned on this Blog about American Injury Lawyers being put though their paces in mock hi-tech courtrooms similar to that of a pilots flight simulator. Is this anything you feel that could catch on over here or are you of the view that this is just a very big expensive pr campaign?
I think that is great, an absolutely brilliant idea but I can not see that it would really take off – it could have some limited application for training purposes for a shared/educational type training facility.
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Part 2 of the interview will be available some time next week so we hope you join us as we try to find out what makes one of the best Personal Injury Lawyers in the UK today tick.
