Law firms may be feeling the pain of the recession, but it seems business is booming for claims managers. As we report this week, a study by the claims management regulator, which sits in the Ministry of Justice, shows that the number of players moving into this market is increasing at a phenomenal rate – from 951 in June 2007 to 2,928 in May this year.

As the regulator succeeds in stamping out areas of malpractice, such as advertising in hospitals, new ones spring up, such as cold calling routed through foreign call centres.

In personal injury, the claims management regulator places the blame firmly on the shoulders of solicitors. It notes that if lawyers met their professional obligations to check out the way claims are gathered, the malpractice would not occur.

That solicitors are failing to comply with their duties in this respect is well established, and the Solicitors Regulation Authority, which has been wrestling with this issue since its inception in 2007, needs to step up its efforts to enforce the rules. But surely the claims management regulator could do more to tackle the claims handlers head-on, rather than shifting the burden onto the solicitors’ regulator. As the study itself acknowledges, given that there are far more claims management companies than originally envisaged, perhaps the time has to come to review whether a regulator operating out of a government department really has the means to deal with this.