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Just to have my second two-penneth, I'd agree with David that there is speculation in the clin neg field. I don't agree with anything else he said, but that much is true.

It's a simple case of PI lawyers moving out of low-reward PI areas into ones where they can still recover reasonable costs. Some are competent, some are not, but I know 2 or 3 myself that have made that move. I'm also contemplating it. More people in that industry = more claims. Not idiotic claims, fair enough - they never existed, whatever the Mail might think - but stuff that lies on the 50/50 boundary.

In answer to your response to returning to the legal aid system pre-woolf, it wasn't terribly well run and it was open to abuse by lawyers who misled the LA board about the chances of success throughout the course of the claim. It was standard to get counsel's opinion from a "favoured" counsel, and because the LA didn't have any specialists in the area, and no-one to go out and review caseloads, lawyers ran rings around them and just let files run and run and run. Nothing to suggest that wouldn't be different this time around what with staff cuts. Also - the tories aren't big on the public ownership of ANYTHING, right?

So there was even less "skin in the game" in that system. The belief with CFAs was that if the costs were pushed on to insurance companies, who were after the people financially backing the people who caused the accidents, they would be better able to manage Claimant costs. They couldn't either, though, which I suspect led naturally to this new incoherent slash and burn regime that both Claimant and Def solicitors hate.

You can argue we got what we deserved, but a more nimble, intelligent government would have changed the system, reducing our costs, without screwing over the Claimants sitting at the bottom of it and transferring those savings to the insurers. Because that IS what happened. That was the explicit aim and they delivered.

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