The trouble with many plaintiffs' personal injury lawyers is that they want the adversarial playing field tilted ever more in their favour as if their objectives were the only reasonable ones.

The plea made by the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) in its recommendations to the Law Commission for jury trials in all personal injury cases and for increased levels of damages is a further manifestation of blinkered and subjective campaigning.I know and respect a large number of the members of APIL and believe its most recent and current leaders are more to be admired than criticised.

However, the Law Commission should be cautious in measuring APIL's credentials and ideas.

By calling itself APIL, the body obscures the fact that it is an association of plaintiff personal injury lawyers.

APIL has been challenged over this more than once and is unapologetic.

In this respect it emulates its counterpart in the USA, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, a body which has had the absence of the word plaintiff in its description challenged as misleading in various states.It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this studious oversight is aimed at enhancing APIL's influence in lobbying for pro-plaintiff changes in personal injury law and practice.

It also perhaps explains why the Gazette, in reporting on these proposals (see [1996] Gazette, 15 May, 8), stated that lawyers, not just plaintiffs' lawyers, strongly support the proposal for jury trials.

Less partisan UK lawyers are unlikely to be supportive of an idea which flies so strongly in the face of Lord Woolf's streamlining proposals, many of which APIL vociferously opposes.However, I suspect APIL is on common ground with most defendants' injury lawyers in seeking greater predictability in the level of awards and increased uniformity in like cases.

These goals can best be achieved by the setting of 'benchmark' figures for various types of cases to be applied by the trial judge.

The trial judge is also likely to be more predictable than a jury in deciding upon liability and causation.The guidelines drawn up by the Judicial Studies Board more than four years ago, and recently revised, have brought sufficient certainty, particularly in the more serious classes of injury.

Reinstating the jury would destroy at a stroke these well-considered reforms.

It would reduce the judge to no more than a Tsecond guesser', having to direct a jury in potentially vague and oblique terms to avoid the suggestion of bias or of attempting to impose a preferred figure on the inexperienced.As we know from widely diverse libel awards still handed down by juries in the UK, and from the maverick behaviour of jurors in personal injury cases in the USA, unpredictability and unfairness reign when the legally untrained are required to be objective.Uncertainty over what personal injury or fatal cases are worth militate against out of court settlements, even when both sides would like to settle.

Instead those parties or advisers who are over keen to have their day in court whether for vengeance, self-justification, reputation, or fees are favoured.

Uncertainty also means unfairness when comparable plaintiffs are awarded significantly different levels of compensation by different juries.The social consequence of summoning and supervising lay juries is not something to be embarked on at the whim of the self-interested and at a time when jury trial is in retreat everywhere but in the USA.A return to jury trial would inevitably result in fewer cases being resolved without the need for lengthy and expensive trials.

This is a result to be deplored.Let juries be confined to inquests and criminal cases.

APIL does itself neither justice nor credit by suggesting otherwise.1996