Why are solicitors claiming 25% of my compo?

rs65

PPR'd apparently

Parking_Trouble

markola78 wrote: »

I had a car accident last week. hit from behind by a lorry. My car is totally written off and Im off work with my back so wanted to claim for my loss of earnings. I've phoned a few solicitors and they all say that if I don't win then there is nothing to pay but if they win they want 25% of my compensation as a fee on top of there legal costs. Feels like they get paid twice and a bit unfair!! is there any other way that I can do it and not have to pay out twice?

The accident only happened last week and you are still off work.

Why not wait to see how your recovery goes, see if there is any lasting damage and decide for yourself how much your injury is worth?

The TP insurer will probably want to make an early offer and you could negotiate with them directly.

(Cue "experts" that will tell you that only an ambulance chaser will know what the right payout is)

Crazy_Jamie

Parking_Trouble wrote: »

Why not wait to see how your recovery goes, see if there is any lasting damage and decide for yourself how much your injury is worth?

Because the average person will usually have no bearing on how much an injury is worth. Injuries are valued on the basis of established guidelines, so expert input is actually usually required to value an injury. You can't just stick your finger in the air and guess.

Parking_Trouble wrote:

(Cue "experts" that will tell you that only an ambulance chaser will know what the right payout is)

I like the way that you put "experts" in inverted commas. You do realise that quite a few people who give advice on these forums do actually work in the industry and can safely be considered "experts" for all intents and purposes? As opposed to members like you, who prefer to peddle information that comes direct from your extensive experience of the Daily Mail and other sensationally inaccurate media outlets.

Parking_Trouble

What do you"experts" in insurance companies actually do these days?

Anyway you don't do compensation claims do you?

You offload all the work to other companies and until recently trousered a nice referral fee for doing sod all!

Or you validate a claim against you own customer by doing what? Challenge the credit hire costs, the repair costs, the write off value, the PI claim usually by jumping in with an early pre-medical offer and very rarely do you get your own (real) experts, like engineers, accident investigators, doctors, etc to challenge what claims management company have put forward.

You are administrators following a process that someone has written for you.

So the OP (still off work) goes to ambulance chaser and they negotiate a payment that is pretty much a current market rate. Tie it all up as quickly as possible and chase the next one. Usually from a call centre pestering people for leads, or adverts in the media, including the Daily Mail to come claim your free money.

I still assert that the victim is the best one to put a price on their own inconvenience.

A serious injury is a different matter and I would use a decent lawyer myself (believe it or not) but a stiff neck or back for a few days is of little consequence.

OP hasn't come back no maybe he has already got his compo.

InsideInsurance

Parking_Trouble wrote: »

What do you"experts" in insurance companies actually do these days?

Anyway you don't do compensation claims do you?

I am a business change consultant mainly specialising in new product development and target operating models. The last couple of years however has been looking at capital adequacy and the supporting processes to ensure accurate data capture/ aggregation is feeding into the models.

I havent been hands on claims handler for a while but have done many of pieces of work designing the handling processes, controls etc

Parking_Trouble wrote: »

Or you validate a claim against you own customer by doing what? Challenge the credit hire costs, the repair costs, the write off value, the PI claim usually by jumping in with an early pre-medical offer and very rarely do you get your own (real) experts, like engineers, accident investigators, doctors, etc to challenge what claims management company have put forward.

Insurers are commercial enterprises and not emotionally connected to the claim. They are therefore able to make cold business decisions -v- standing up for the principle. In my days of claims handling we would review every credit hire invoice individually, typically you could possibly knock a day or two off or drop the car a group probably in 25% of cases. Alternatively you can agree a batch process with selective auditing of cases and get a universal 20% discount off all bills. The maths isnt hard to do.

Repairs by an accident management company are rare but were always reviewed by our own engineers. Repairs by other insurers generally werent unless we had particular concerns over the case.

How do you define "expert"? Most those working in the disputed liability or personal injury space do have many years of experience and will have gone through several other claims departments to get there. You'll also have oversight from other more experienced people and they can become fairly senior depending on the value of the claim.

Again there is a question of economics, so my largest every claim I handled had oversight from the in house barrister for our office on a "daily" basis but for the key decisions it went to the head office barrister as it exceed local limits. It clearly isnt cost effective to have guys with 6 figure salaries review every case.

Yes if its a big case and there is questionable or complex evidence you submit medical reports to the inhouse Dr for review or external review if its really specialist. But there is no point spending £750 on irrecoverable fees to try and knock £500 off a claim.

Crazy_Jamie

Parking_Trouble wrote: »

What do you"experts" in insurance companies actually do these days?

Anyway you don't do compensation claims do you?

You offload all the work to other companies and until recently trousered a nice referral fee for doing sod all!

Or you validate a claim against you own customer by doing what? Challenge the credit hire costs, the repair costs, the write off value, the PI claim usually by jumping in with an early pre-medical offer and very rarely do you get your own (real) experts, like engineers, accident investigators, doctors, etc to challenge what claims management company have put forward.

You are administrators following a process that someone has written for you.

I do not work for an insurance company. And as much as you adore the term, I'm afraid I'm not what you would call an 'ambulance chaser' either. As I've said before I'm sure there are a few people on these forums who have worked out what I do, but you are clearly not one of them. So I do appreciate the misinformed vitriol aimed towards those who work in the insurance industry, but none of it would apply to me even if it were actually true. But by all means if you want to pick another profession within the industry to aim some nonsense at please do feel free.

Parking_Trouble wrote:

I still assert that the victim is the best one to put a price on their own inconvenience.

I still assert that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Mainly because the price that a person puts on their own 'inconvenience' is irrelevant; courts compensate for injuries, and quite specifically not for inconvenience. If you ask ten different people what value they would place on the 'inconvenience' of an eight week lower back injury you would get ten different answers, and probably wildly different answers at that. Surprisingly enough courts value some degree of consistency in personal injury litigation, hence why the involvement of an expert in the field is necessary to ensure that each individual gets the amount that their injury actually warrants.

Parking_Trouble wrote:

A serious injury is a different matter and I would use a decent lawyer myself (believe it or not) but a stiff neck or back for a few days is of little consequence.

Why, out of interest, do your steadfast principles suddenly fly out of the window with a 'serious' injury? What do you define as 'serious'?

Crazy_Jamie

Well, that was unexpected. Not because you posted something like that; all things considered it's about as useful and constructive as most things you post. I just thought it would take much longer for you to abandon your usual nonsense and actually make things personal. Ironically though that post will have benefited the forums as a whole, as hopefully anyone who actually thought that you had a shred of credibility left will now realise that you lost that long ago.

InsideInsurance

Parking_Trouble wrote: »

I still assert that the victim is the best one to put a price on their own inconvenience.

The main issue with this is two fold:

1) Many "victims" do very much see themselves having been wronged by the other party and are looking for punitive damages - sue him for all he's got. The British legal systems however do not award punitive damages unlike the USA and so you wont get £5m for whiplash just because the third party was driving a brand new ferrari like an idiot and didnt admit liability straight away

2) Arguably linked to the above, our legal systems are based on indemnity, ie putting you back in the same position you were in had the accident never happened. For some things this is easy, loss of earnings when the person has already gone back to work you just look at the payslips. For pain, suffering and loss of amenities its much more difficult as it can also be for calculating the cost of future earnings.

As an example, childhood sweethearts aged 25, recently married, husband killed in an RTA. Was on a management fast track scheme earning £25k. How would you value the pain and suffering of his widow? How many years of earnings would you pay her? Surely she'll say they'd have been together until they were 80 so ~45 years of earnings. What would his salary have been in 5 years time? or 20 years if you go with her view? I am sure she will think he'd have been a CxO on a high 6 figure salary by then.

Of cause we also have TV adverts inflating peoples expectations of payouts to contend with.

Nebulous2

So how do you put a value on something then? In particular how can you do it without the case dragging on for years and leaving people very battered by the process? I know someone very similar to the example given. Hit by a car driving too quickly which lost control. He was seriously injured and his girlfriend killed. Last time I spoke to him about it his anger.had transferred to the insurance company from the driver. This was because they are arguing the relationship might not have lasted. Perfectly true, but the last thing he needs to hear now.

If there is a formula and his solicitor and the other insurer know it, why is there a need to put him through that?

On a slightly different note, how do you value something minor? Whiplash has become notorious but how do you value something much easier to prove, like a broken finger?

Crazy_Jamie

Nebulous2 wrote: »

So how do you put a value on something then? In particular how can you do it without the case dragging on for years and leaving people very battered by the process? I know someone very similar to the example given. Hit by a car driving too quickly which lost control. He was seriously injured and his girlfriend killed. Last time I spoke to him about it his anger.had transferred to the insurance company from the driver. This was because they are arguing the relationship might not have lasted. Perfectly true, but the last thing he needs to hear now.

If there is a formula and his solicitor and the other insurer know it, why is there a need to put him through that?

On a slightly different note, how do you value something minor? Whiplash has become notorious but how do you value something much easier to prove, like a broken finger?

Straightforward isolated injuries are a two stage process. The first is to have a look at the Judicial College guidelines. They are an extensive set of guidelines that are updated every year that contain broad categories for most types of injury. For example, let's take a simple six month whiplash injury. The relevant part of the Judicial College Guidelines for that is Chapter 7 Paragraph A(c)(ii), which states that neck injuries where recovery takes place between a few months and a year warrants an award of between £1,550 and £3,200. So you have the bracket, and if you need to you can then look at specific cases involving similar injuries to the one you are dealing with, which should give you a more accurate feel for the valuation. But a lot of it does come down to experience given that most injury cases are not as straightforward as having one isolated injury.

If, as is common, you have several injuries, then the process is the same but requires more in the way of experience from the person valuing the injury. For example, let's say that someone has been in a road traffic accident and had a six months neck injury (whiplash), a four month lower back injury, and six months of travel anxiety. You cannot simply look up those three injuries individually and add them together, because courts allow for overlap and reduce awards accordingly. In this particular case most judges will consider the back injury to be very closely related to the neck injury, and will therefore only award a relatively small increase. Equally travel anxiety is a common element of road traffic claims, and whilst the award will be increased to take it into consideration, it will not be as much as if the travel anxiety was an isolated symptom. To establish how much the additional injuries will boost the award you can look at caselaw, but again it also comes down to experience a lot of the time of knowing how judges will deal with such overlap.

The third category of very serious injuries such as the one you describe is very complicated, even for those who are experience in the industry. The reason for that is not so much the general damages (the amount that the injury or injuries are worth), though that can be complex, but the special damages, namely other areas of financial loss such as loss of earnings and gratuitous care. For very serious injuries a person's earning capacity may be reduced, and calculating what a person would have earned had they not been injuried can be difficult to say the least. Where a person has died (known unsurprisingly as a Fatal Accident claim) things become more complex still, as you have to come to a figure that predicts life expectancy and earnings had the person not been involved in the accident, which for young people in particular is extremely difficult to do. The same calculation is required where a person may have survived but their life expectancy has been reduced, or their earning ability has been eliminated all together.

In all cases a definitive prognosis is required as to the injuries, not just in terms of the person's recovery but in terms of how those injuries will affect a person in their day to day life, including their ability to look after themselves and their earning capacity. In cases of very serious injury it can legitimate take many years before a person's prognosis becomes certain to the extent that a court can confidently make an award that properly reflects the person's pain, suffering and loss. There is no 'quick fix' in those sorts of cases, and whilst there are certainly times when personal injury litigation takes longer than it should, equally there are plenty of cases where settlement or a conclusion quite legitimately takes a long time.

That was a long post. Let me know if you want me to clarify any of it.