No personal injury lawyer enjoys being called an ‘ambulance chaser’, even if, on occasion, they slip a business card into the bloodied hand of a car crash victim.

Such a scene (fictional, I should add) was played out in a TV advertisement I saw last week while across the pond, where I spent an otherwise pleasurable three weeks.

For my first week – the week that provided me with the sharpest cultural shock – I visited Missouri, in the heart of the mid-west. Between Kansas City, which straddles the western border of the state, and the small town of Odessa, about 70 miles to the east along a perfectly straight interstate, giant billboards tower hundreds of feet over passing traffic. They display colourful messages with similar themes: eat this fast food; sleep in this motel; buy this piece of real estate; watch this episode on TV; eat some more fast food (my personal favourites were the evangelical messages: ‘Jesus Saves and Forgives – Pornography Slaves and Lies’, one of them read).

And of course, the no-win-no-fee claim-as-much-as-you-can billboards popped up every couple of miles: a giant cut-out of a slightly tubby cop, next to him a telephone with a big green dollar sign on the dial, and in the background, hundreds of dollar bills floating gently down to earth. Call 1-800-INJURY-CASH.

The TV ads – especially the locally made ones – were worse (and I’m not talking about production quality). During one scene, a moustached man highlighted pieces of a bloodied three-dimensional floating body diagram, and as he did so, the average cash award for limbs broken at work popped up underneath (as well as the obligatory dollar signs and floating cash).

Perhaps Lord Young, who told the Conservative Party conference this week that he is ‘ashamed’ of personal injury lawyers when it comes to their advertising methods, would do well to speak to Barack Obama about a job. The peer, who is leading a review of the dastardly ‘compensation culture’ on behalf of prime minister David Cameron, would be in for a shock.

I don’t see much daytime TV, but I have seen a couple of personal injury ads in this country. They’re really not all that shocking, are they? A middle-aged man in a grey suit watches on solemnly while a few low-grade actors perform comical trips and slips. Yes, there are a few pound signs dotted here and there, and a few giant cheques changing hands. But unless Young has invented a time machine that can undo each and every negligently caused work accident, then surely compensation is an acceptable evil?

Perhaps the nearest Young has come to sustaining an injury at work is stumbling over a cracked floor tile in one of the labyrinthine corridors of the Lords. He has worn a ‘white collar’ all of his working life as a lawyer (he practised for just one year), a businessman, and a politician. As far as the Gazette is aware, he has not worked on a factory floor, driven a forklift truck, or climbed up a ladder day-in, day-out to paint houses.

The key word, as personal injury lawyers would point out, is ‘negligence’. Spurious personal injury claims, and claims caused purely by accident, rather than negligence, should fail. But people who genuinely deserve redress should not be dissuaded from pursuing meritorious claims against their employers, regardless of the distaste that one Tory peer has for personal injury solicitors’ advertising methods.

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