Compensation is awarded based on the severity of your injury and how long this will affect your everyday life, so it is important that the right amount is awarded – if you settle and then are still suffering you may statutory barred from bringing another claim (for the same accident) or trying to reopen or continue the original claim.
As well as personal injury solicitors, there are a number of claims management companies that will try and get you to instruct them. Similarly, your insurance company will also try to refer you to a solicitor and finally, there is also the possibility that the third party will try and capture you. All of the above may also say that they can get you the optimum amount of compensation but there may be more to this than first meets the eye.
All of the above are involved in referral fees, expect for the third party trying to capture the claim. This means that they “refer” you across to a solicitor- in practice they are actually “selling” you to them. The solicitor will pay the claims company or insurance Company for your details to enable them to run the case. As whiplash is most commonly brought about by a car accident this is the main example I shall now use.
In the Road Traffic Accident Protocol, solicitors are only able to recover fixed fees- therefore if a solicitor has already paid £1000.00 to a middleman, they have £1000.00 less to spend on running your case. This can directly impact on the amount of compensation you receive, as the solicitor is less likely to do as much work on your case to fight for a higher payout. So this also means fewer letters, phone calls and less general case work done such as reviewing medical evidence and putting forth offers because a huge portion of the claim budget was wasted on a referral fee. During the settlement process, they may not fight for a better offer if they feel that they can no longer afford to as they have used their budget up.
Here at The Injury Lawyers we do not get involved in referral fees – we keep all our funds to run your case to the best of our (expert) ability and therefore have no issue with negotiating hard with the other side for the best settlement possible. To us, it is not about getting the case done as quickly as possible to ensure we do not over-spend, it is about getting you the best compensation possible.
For rough estimations of whiplash values, there are the Judicial Studies Board guidelines these are:
- Minor injuries= £875-£5150
- Moderate=£5150-£15,000
- Severe= £15,000-£97,500
As you can see these are wide brackets as compensation is awarded on each case’s individual merits. This emphasises the importance of instructing a specialist personal injury solicitor to deal with your case to ensure that you get the BEST POSSIBLE settlement and not just one that someone couldn’t be worth fighting for.