Claimant personal injury lawyers’ fees should be cut by extending the new road traffic accident (RTA) claims process, and by allowing insurance companies to undertake ‘third-party capture’, the new president of the Forum of Insurance Lawyers (FOIL) told the Gazette this week.

Tim Oliver, senior partner at London and Leeds firm Plexus Law, said there is ‘no evidence’ that a claimant will not get the correct compensation if they settle directly with an insurer through one of its panel law firms. He said that ‘the only loser is the claimant solicitor, and I don’t think anyone will be crying over that’.

Oliver said defendant lawyers believed the new RTA personal injury claims process, intended to speed up and reduce the cost of claims valued between £1,000 and £10,000, should be extended to non-RTA claims, as proposed by the government. The process was introduced at the behest of the Ministry of Justice in April to handle an estimated 500,000 claims per year.

He said that claimant legal costs are ‘too high’, and that the expansion of the process for low-value claims would lead to a ‘big drop’.

‘The process is working very well at the moment; the portal is well set up,’ he said.

Oliver also cast doubt on claimant lawyer assertions that insurers are ‘abusing’ the RTA process. ‘It’s absolutely not true,’ he said. ‘The insurers have a very tight timescale in which to respond.’

Oliver suggested that employers’ liability and public liability claims would be the easiest to adapt to fit a similar process for low-value claims.

On the prospect of insurance companies owning their own law firms once alternative business structures are available next October, Oliver said that he would be ‘surprised’ if insurers had not considered this, but said he does not know of any concrete plans. ‘They are big purchasers of legal services, and they could reduce that spend by owning a law firm,’ he said.