Here is your one stop shop advice guide as to what exactly to do. My best suggestion is read this first before you do anything (and I mean anything – including speaking to your own insurers) and you will hopefully be able to rest a little easier when you know what you need to do.
At The Scene
Hopefully you obtained all the details of the other driver involved. As long as, at the very least, you got their registration number, we can track them down and get the rest of the information we need to sort your claim out. If anyone stopped to help you and have their details, you should definitely retain them – vital information from them could be used as witness evidence in the event the other driver decides to be mean and tried to claim they weren’t at fault – which does sadly happen.
If the accident required police assistance, make sure you retain any information the officers provided to you as well.
What’s Next?
It’s worth nipping to a local walk in centre, A+E, or your doctors to get checked over; even if you’re not feeling any pain yet. You will likely end up with a whiplash type injury, the symptoms of which don’t usually make themselves apparent until hours – if not, days – after the accident. It’s likely you will wake up one morning feeling like you’ve slept awkwardly.
If you haven’t been to a clinic yet, and you are feeling the pain, get yourself checked out as soon as possible, and make sure you explain to the medic clearly what happened.
Your Vehicle
Hopefully, your vehicle is still drivable. If it isn’t, and you’ve had to have it recovered, make sure you check for any charges that may be incurred for storing your car whilst the insurance side of things gets sorted out.
What to Do
If the accident was not your fault, you will need to make a claim for your car damages. But, before you call your insurers, speak to a personal injury lawyer first – especially if you are suffering any pain whatsoever. Whilst it is entirely up to you as to how you would like to proceed, my best advice is to speak to an independent firm of specialist personal injury lawyers quickly; here’s why.
Insurers May Be Looking to SELL Your Claim
Whilst the term “sell” is used loosely, as soon as your insurers are aware you have had an accident and you were not at fault, they have the opportunity to make a quick profit of up to £1000 by referring your claim over to a personal injury lawyer. It’s often known as Legal Expense Insurance, or Motor Legal Protection, and you may well already have it on your car policy, and you may well be paying for it. Whilst it is a type of insurance, there is something very wrong with what actually happens to your claim in my opinion.
Your insurer will have a panel of solicitors to refer the claim over to. The firm willing to pay the most to have your details and take on your claim is the one that will likely get it. A referral fee will be paid by your solicitor to your insurers in order to take your case on. Your insurers instantly make a profit of up to £1000, and you get lumbered with a potentially rubbish solicitor!
The main problem is that the lawyer that has paid the referral fee is unable to recover this fee from the other side. They will have to absorb the cost either by charging you some sort of admin fee, taking a percentage away from your payout, or seriously reducing the services they can offer. You also don’t get to chose the firm you want – so, how do you know they are any good? What are their service levels and client care policies like? Are they specialist personal injury lawyers? Who knows…
The best way to think of it is this – what would you rather have out of the following two options:
- An independent firm of specialist personal injury lawyers you have personally chosen because of their sterling reputation, and the services they offer? Such as:
- Contact at least every 14 days
- Private medical care from the start of the claim – which you never pay for
- An agreement that actually guarantees in writing you will receive 100% compensation with no deductions and no hidden charges.
- An actual specialist solicitor dealing with your file
- Hire car and repair needs all sorted under one roof
Or, would you rather have:
2. A lawyer that has paid £1000 for your case; a firm you haven’t personally chosen and know nothing about, and one where you have no idea as to their service levels? If they have spent £1000 for your case, and they will only receive around £1500 in costs, how can they afford to provide you with a quality service? Reviewing your medical report alone could take a couple of hours – that at £250 an hour, which means they haven’t got anything (in theory) to spend on running the rest of your claim.
- Where are the interim payment requests?
- Where’s the private medical treatment?
- Where’s the regular contact?
Unless of course… it’s not an actual lawyer dealing with your case, but an under qualified case handler or assistant…
Hopefully, you can see my point.
I Trust My Insurers / They Tell Me a No Win No Fee Lawyer Will Charge Me!
When your insurers tell you that you have the benefit of a lawyer as part of your policy, you may implicitly trust them and just go with it. They may even tell you that with a No Win No Fee lawyer you will be charged.
Well, we are a No Win No Fee Lawyer… and we don’t charge our clients whether they win or lose their case. We recover our legal fees directly from the other side, and they are limited in writing to whatever they pay us – so we cannot come back to our clients for any money we fail to recover. If we lose, we write all of our fees off as we only ever accept a claim we are confident will win.
OK – so I work for a Genuine No Win No Fee law firm. You could be reading this advice and thinking I’m just trying to sell you our services, and that I “would say this” about insurers etc. Well, I’ve heard enough stories in my time of clients who have had horrible experiences with insurance referred solicitors, and we see the evidence when the client transfers their files over to us and we see what (or what has not!) happened on their case.
But, you don’t have to take my word for it – here are a few things you should read and look at:
Law Society / Bar Council Recommend Referral Fees to Stop
Both the Law Society and the Bar Council recommended that referral fees be stopped, on the grounds that they have the potential to limit access to justice and reduce the quality of legal services on offer.
Jack Straw (Former Justice Secretary) Slams Insurers “Referral Racket”
Jack Straw has hit out at the insurance industry about the whole thing I’ve been writing about above. He has called for the referral fees to be stopped as well. I won’t go in to it too much as we have already covered it in other articles. However, have a look at these links to stories in the news that cover the topic rather nicely:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13922554
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jun/28/jack-straw-insurance-customer-details
http://news.sky.com/home/business/article/16019499
You have the choice to choose any lawyer you want – use this power and get the best one that offers you the best service for your claim.