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All of this disruption in the PI industry and the knock-on effects of thousands of redundancies and some people being denied fair compensation is down to the simple factor of massive greed.

I'm old enough to remember when legal aid existed for PI claims. There were very few claims on the fund as the vast majority of claims were won or settled. You didn't make a fortune out of PI work, but it was a respectable area of the profession.

But then the government made one of the most monumentally stupid decisions ever - to replace legal aid with CFA's.

At first it wasn't too bad, as ironically the system was similar to the current one, and the client had to pay a slice of their damages towards the costs.

But then came Monumentally Bad Decision #2 - to allow recovery of the success fee and ATE from the defendant.

This was the killer, as suddenly PI claims became a licence to print money. Inevitably, all the shysters and scammers started crawling out of the woodwork to join in the cashfest and suddenly things like accident management companies, credit hire, credit repair, medical report agencies and other parasites began to emerge, half of them owned by the shyster solicitors who were bringing the profession into disrepute.

I recall receiving emails from recruitment firms advertising PI fee-earners who were grossing £300k but being paid £30k and thinking this is just too good to last. It really was a gravy train - it was easy to make £300 an hour off some pathetic claim that could be run by a paralegal on £10 an hour.

The sheer volume of greed that this unleashed was one of the most disgusting periods in the history of the profession, and I was ashamed to be part of it. I got out of PI when I started having to buy cases, but the sheer fact that a case would sell for a few hundred quid was a clear signal that there was too much money available.

So to all the PI practitioners who are now complaining you have only yourselves to blame. If you hadn't milked the system so voraciously for the past 10 years or more the pressure for reforms would never have existed, or certainly not with the intensity that developed as a direct response to that greed.

I'm personally glad that those parasites are likely to go bust - good riddance. I just feel sorry for the poor people caught in the cross fire - the few decent solicitors who didn't screw the system and more particularly the genuinely injured clients who will now be left without representation.