If you have been injured as a result of an accident that was not your own fault, you may have a strong claim for personal injury. With so many law firms out there, it can be a difficult decision as to who to choose to fight for your claim.
A first point to note is that many firms out there are not actually personal injury law firms. Many simply act as referral agents. These agents can sell your claim on for as much as £800 to a law firm. Logic tells us that if a law firm spends £800 on your claim, they have decreased their margin for profit, and so to balance this reduction out, they may work less on your claim, and provide you with a lower level of service. We firmly believe this is crazy!
So, the first useful point has been made – go to a law firm direct. Once approaching a law firm directly, there are other factors which you may also need to research before instructing them. Firstly, you may want to know how much experience they have with personal injury claims such as your own – whether it is an accident at work, or a product liability claim, or a road accident, for example.
Secondly, you may then want to check that they offer genuine no win no fee services, meaning you are guaranteed to never pay a penny to your lawyers. If they do offer no win no fee services, the agreement should be checked thoroughly before instructing the firm. In the agreement, you are looking out for whether you are guaranteed 100% of your compensation, and whether you win or lose, you never have to pay your solicitors costs. I say this as there are some firms that may charge you; however, firms such as The Injury Lawyers offer genuine no win no fee agreements – if we win our client’s case, we recover our costs from the other side; if the case loses, we have insurance in place to cover our losses – and you never pay for the insurance.
If you have established that you are happy with the no win no fee agreement, you should then look to the service standards of the firm. Here you many want to look for policies such as returning client calls within 24 hours, or updating clients every 2 weeks on the progress of their claim. Many law firms also offer extra services such as arranging private medical care at no cost to you, or arranging for the damage on your vehicle to be repaired.
If you have any queries regarding the above, feel free to give us a call and we would be happy to help.
