It’s no secret that claimant and defendant personal injury lawyers do not exactly see eye to eye much of the time. Speaking at the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers’ very posh president’s lunch at the Armourers’ Hall in London last week, APIL president John McQuater said he hoped the two sides would be less combative in the future. However, he recalled one incident not so long ago which was not quite in line with the new touchy-feely approach. McQuater recounted: ‘After negotiating settlement in a particularly contentious case the damages cheque finally arrived. The paying party [presumably the insurer] clearly felt unable to bring themselves to write a letter, so the cheque was accompanied by just a compliments slip. On the slip, the words "with compliments" had been very carefully crossed out.’ Ever the cunning entrepreneur, Obiter sees a business opportunity here: selling ‘without any compliments whatsoever’ slips for insurance companies to use in their final correspondence with the claimant side. And if McQuater’s call for a more civilised approach makes him sound like a bit of a softie, don’t be fooled. A business colleague confided that in tense claimant strategy meetings, when lawyers were grimly assessing what action to take, McQuater was often known to break the tension by exclaiming ‘let’s boil their heads!’. We are told he did not mean it literally, but best to stay on the right side of him, just in case.