The Ministry of Justice has been warned that forcing medical reports to be submitted prematurely has the potential to create satellite litigation.

Justice officials want providers to upload medical reports to the Official Injury Claim portal as soon as they have completed them to allow for fact checking by insurers.

Currently it takes on average 21 days for reports on unrepresented whiplash claims to be uploaded, and data appears to show that this time is longer where claimants are represented.

But the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) has urged the MoJ to drop proposals for disclosure of medical reports in road traffic claims.

‘Forcing premature disclosure of medical reports by getting experts to upload them to OIC without due consideration and fact checking is a dangerous proposal which would ultimately erode injured people’s rights,’ said APIL secretary Brett Dixon. ‘It also causes the risk of significant satellite litigation as it does not take account of the privileged nature of the report in this context.”

He added that a claimant is entitled to take time to fact-check or even consider whether they want to rely on a report. 

The MoJ consultation on this issue suggested that requiring immediate uploading of reports ‘would smooth out the current two-tier approach and would allow for more detailed analysis of the medical reporting stages for both represented and unrepresented claimants’.

APIL is also opposed to the proposal that claimants must wait for insurers to confirm decisions on liability and causation before they can instruct a medical expert.

Data from OIC shows that the average time taken for a liability decision to be made for unrepresented claimants is 13 days and the average time for represented claims is 18 days.

Dixon said waiting for confirmation on liability would lead to ‘significant delays’ and that the MoJ was wrong to focus so much on unrepresented claims. ‘The proposals fail to acknowledge that the vast majority of OIC users have legal representation. For the process to work it must reflect the needs of the majority,’ he added. ‘The majority of users in this system are represented and changing the process to reflect the minority unrepresented journey is not wise.’

 

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