Legal expenses insurance is undoubtedly the biggest scam in the personal injury claims arena!. It involves your insurance company SELLING your details across to a solicitor – and this solicitor will then contact you and run your case (if you confirm with them of course). Many would think that, this has nothing to do with them – so what if they have bought my details – why does that matter to me?
I assure you IT DOES! Nothing causes more frustration here in the office, than when insurance companies and the solicitors involved in this system catch people in their trap.
Under the road traffic accident protocol, solicitors are only able to recover fixed fees. This is relevant because, if your solicitor has already paid a chunk of money to the insurance company for your details (shall we say £1,000 – which is not an uncommon amount), this takes away from the amount of money they have available to them to run your case.
For example : if the solicitor is given £2,000 pounds to work on a case and pays the above referral fee, that is 50% of their allocated funds GONE!
This can heavily impede on both the service level you receive and (perhaps most importantly) the amount of compensation you are awarded.
But how does that link to a final settlement? This seems to be the next major question that anyone I speak to about this topic asks. If your solicitor has only £1,000 left to run your case, this means fewer phone calls, letters, emails and basically less “action” on your case. With regards to your service level this means that you may not updated as often as you should/could be, non-urgent correspondence is left to be dealt with another time (slowing the process down) and can leave you feeling very out of the loop on your OWN claim! (I have experienced this first hand!)
In relation to your final compensation – if you’re experiencing a lack of phone calls, letters ect… It is highly likely that these are not being sent to third parties chasing information either or counter-offering any proposed settlements. Solicitors, of course, do not work for free and therefore with a smaller budget to run your case, it’s highly unlikely that the defendant will be chased to speed up the process and again unlikely that your settlement is fought for as strongly as it ought to be.
Here at The Injury Lawyers we do not involve ourselves in referrals AT ALL!
All our clients come to us direct and therefore we have all the funds available to us to run your claim. This means more letters, more calls and basically just a more client friendly way of processing claims.
We push this one step further than most other law firms too by having a 14 day contact policy which means every 2 weeks you’ll be updated on your case – whether anything has changed or not! We also dedicate ourselves to chasing third parties for responses, and do not settle at an offer we are unhappy with just because we cannot afford to send another letter.
We also DO NOT take any of your final compensation – you receive 100% of this – and we recover our fees from the other side – with our genuine NO WIN NO FEE guarantee! So, in summary, by coming direct to an actual law firm like ourselves you get: better service levels, an experience personal injury solicitor AND a better final settlement. Simple decision really.
Please note: If you think you are unfortunately already involved in this system and wish to change solicitors, this is something we can look to help you out with, so do not hesitate to contact us if this is the case.
