No Win - No Fee AccidentAt the time then-minister Geoffrey Hoon said: "No win no fee accident conditional agreements will result in better access to justice. Access will only be given to the many people who fall between those who are very rich or those who are so poor that they qualify for legal aid. "In future, the question of whether one gets one's case to court will no longer depend on whether one can afford it, but on whether one's case is a strong one." The 1999 Access to Justice Act, which came into force in April of 2000, dramatically increased the attractiveness of no-win no-fee accident deals as judges could make the losing side bear the extra costs associated with conditional fee cases. These are the "uplift" fees charged by solicitors, an increase on normal fees to compensate for the possibility of loss and therefore no fee, and the insurance premiums paid to protect against the other side's legal costs in the event of defeat. And legal aid for personal injury cases was done away with, making a conditional fee agreement many people's only hope of justice. The changes in the law have prompted a blizzard of negative press stories about the legal industry, particularly in its most reported sector, personal injury. Martin Bare, outgoing president of the Association for Personal Injury Lawyers, denies this. "There is no free ride. The perception arises because people don't think that for the cases that you win, there's another that you lose, for which you get nothing." Lawyers typically blame this public perception of the compensation culture at the door of claim management firms. Often, these are not staffed by solicitors, and instead act as middlemen, passing clients on to lawyers. The changes to the law made it desirable to advertise their services on television. The statistics of personal injury claims do not necessarily back up the idea of a compensation culture. Cases involving accident and disease are notified to the Compensation Recovery Unit of the Department for Work and Pensions, as part of efforts to recoup disability benefit and NHS treatment costs from the party responsible from the injury. These figures have been relatively stable. The number of cases registered to the unit in 2000/1 was 735,931. The number in 2007/8 was 732,750. In its 2008 report on the "compensation culture", the House of Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee heard evidence that personal injury claims had gone up from about 250,000 in the early 1970s to its current level, but that the introduction of no-win no-fee had coincided with this levelling off. Lawyers dispute that no-win no-fee accident inevitably leads to more frivolous claims and more cases generally. They say the solicitor acts as a filter, knowing that every case that doesn't make it to court or a settlement is a financial loss to the firm. "Our assessment has to be that the prospects of success are at least 60%," says personal injury lawyer Jeffrey Logan, partner at Liverpool solicitors firm Goodmans, adding that solicitors now have more of an interest in making sure there are no costly delays in a case. "The common perception is that we live in this compensation culture," says Malcolm Tarling, of the Association of British Insurers. "What we have seen in recent years is an increase in the average personal injury award." Bare puts this down to the million dollar payouts given to victims rendered quadriplegic or otherwise seriously affected. He says any such rise can be attributed to increased life expectancies being factored into awards for people who will need a lifetime of care and will never earn a salary. As well as the drain on resources, no win no fee accident has also been blamed for creating a "risk averse" culture where games of conkers are banned, lamp-posts are padded and playgrounds closed. And it's important to remember that for all the cases dismissed by the courts or rejected at an early stage by solicitors, there has still been energy expended in dealing with the initial complaints. |