With so many law firms to choose from to represent you for your claim for personal injury compensation, people will often end up short listing solicitors based on criteria such as their location.
It makes sense I suppose – if you have a local law firm dealing with the claim then you could have access to see them whenever you wanted and you ought to be guaranteed that you won’t need to travel around as part of the case.
But you could be losing out by using a local lawyer for a claim for compensation – read on for why.
It’s about cost!
Back in the day before our ‘wonderful’ government went and radically changed the way in which fees are recovered for compensation claims, victims of negligence could rightfully get access to a service where they’d receive all 100% of their compensation if the case was successful. On top of that the no win, no fee allowed for no upfront fees and a genuine ‘it does what it says on the tin’ kind of system for the most part.
But April 2013 saw reforms that slashed legal fees to a fraction of what they used to be. In fact they’re barely workable to provide a proper service, and on top of that, you can’t even recover all your legal fees from the opponent any more!
Whether you believe in the principle of the reforms or not, the fact is they went too far and innocent accident victims are the ones losing out – both in money terms and in access to justice terms.
So what you need to be looking at in my opinion are things like this:
- What percentage of your claim will your local lawyer take?
- What upfront costs are involved?
- Are they specialist injury lawyers who can run an efficient service to keep costs down and therefore keep the risk of you paying more down?
So do I need a local lawyer?
Not at all – cost is what you should be looking at as opposed to where the law firm is so you should concentrate on that. But you don’t need a local lawyer because:
- Everything can be done via phone, email, and post – and we personally have an online portal system for you to access as well
- Most legal fees are fixed, so its likely that a local lawyer wouldn’t be able to budget seeing you all the time anyway, which can defeat the whole object behind choosing a local lawyer
- Having a lawyer who is hundreds of miles away doesn’t mean you need to travel too far – all medical appointments or meetings can be done where you live, and where court ever is necessary, it will normally done at your local court
So – it’s all about keeping costs down instead of where your lawyer is. That’s what we think you need to bear in mind!
