Personal Injury

“No Win, No Fee” Advertisers

“No win, no fee” adverts seem to suggest that the advertiser is a solicitor’s firm or a panel of firms of solicitors.  In reality the advertiser is a Claims Management Company that gathers basic information from you and then sells that to a panel solicitor.  Some solicitors pay as much as £850 per case.

It is a sad fact of life that panel membership of these schemes is not based on quality, but is based on the solicitor’s ability to pay for files and to handle large numbers of cases.

Using A “No Win, No Fee” Panel Solicitor Can Seriously Damage Your Wealth

How can this be the case?  Surely if a firm has paid £700 for my case, they will be more committed than the High Street solicitor in getting me the most compensation?

Unfortunately economics do not allow that to be the case.  In road traffic accident cases there are fixed costs.  So if your claim is worth £2,000 the solicitor will receive a maximum of £1,100 for their costs (excluding VAT and expenses).  However, the £850 they have paid is not treated as an expense, so in effect they receive £250 for doing the work.  In real terms you can expect to receive a quarter of the service from a panel solicitor that you would receive from a High Street firm.

So how do panel firms make a profit?  The first step is not to use accredited solicitors [? Hyperlink to “Measuring Quality”].  If there is an accredited solicitor within the firm, they will not be dealing with your case.  If you are reading this after you’ve instructed a panel solicitor, ask why your case is not being dealt with by the accredited solicitor.

The second step is to use medical agencies to obtain the medical notes and to instruct an “appropriate” medical expert.  In our experience the instructions are poor, sometimes to the extent that medical notes do not form part of the instructions, and rarely are the experts appropriate.  Quite often we find clients are sent to poorly qualified or even non-practicing medical specialists.  Another problem is that the instructions are quite often premature so that the expert is instructed before the client’s injuries have resolved or even begun to settle down.  We have also discovered that some medical agencies pay the panel solicitors a commission.

The third step is to persuade you to accept the first offer.  The panel solicitors need to do this to assist cash flow (the £700 having already been paid by them).