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This means one thing and one thing only - hundreds of thousands of lawyers out of employment with almost every firm closing their PI dept. Claimants are going to be bombarded with Government backed advertising saying they don't need a lawyer and can go directly to Court resolution for eg. a one off £100 fee. Anyone who seeks advice will find themselves back against the wall as all any defendant has to do is to deny liability and force the Plaintiff to issue a Court based claim. From then onwards the Plaintiff is on their own as lawyers can't recover costs. The Defendant pays their £100 or whatever the fee is, a small gamble for most Insurance Companies, and the Plaintiff if they want to pursue has to do so totally unrepresented or if lawyers want to help him present his case, even assuming that's allowed, totally unpaid from that point onwards, which effectively rules them out in any event.

With lawyers bypassed on all claims up to £25K, virtually every Personal Injury lawyer in every area of PI law is redundant. Hardly any member of the public will ever seek advice given the likely advertising and of the few that do, you're talking an hour session before they issue using the new Court process. How many Dept's can survive on a single hours advice from the very occasional client that even seeks it?

As I see it only catastrophic injury Depts can survive and even then, is CI enough to sustain a PI dept alone? Major injuries don't happen every day. Even group actions are out of the door as the value of individual claims are likely to be below £25K in all but the most serious of cases.

This is likely the tip of the ice berg, as the same can then be said for employment lawyers as no doubt the next move will be to move Employment Tribunals the same way.

It also distorts justice as the Defendants being Insurance Companies will always have inhouse advice throughout the whole process. So you have a Litigant in Person vs an Inhouse Legal Team. The only result can be the slaughter of the LIP, not necessarily because they don't have a case, but simply because they don't recognise the pertinent points and so are likely to fail to represent themselves properly with those points being absent from any case presented. Hardly justice.

We seem to be moving towards a style of law as seen on televised Court "reality" shows. Where both parties tell a tale and the judge applies the law as he sees fit rather than lawyers who argue a case and represent the party. Whereas at 1st glance the outcome might be the same, you have to ask yourself, how many times has the losing party become the winning party after representations from a lawyer? How many times have damages been raised (or lowered) after arguments over applicable law / case law? Leaving decisions in the mind of one person who only sees one view of any tale, and an LIP who cannot see the relevant parts to tell, cannot lead to true justice.

Unfortunately, this isn't going to be seen. Instead we going to see huge numbers of job losses and a system of Televised style law in my opinion - pay £100, tell your tale over Skype or email form (however badly), and either win or lose at the judges / administrators perspective, often with the LIP failing to tell the whole tale.