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Sadly I have little doubt that other than delaying clin neg fixed fees (which government will press ahead with now) something very like this will be coming in and very soon. This will kill off much of the remainder of my sector of the profession (on both sides) and is massively bad news for justice. (There are very few PI cases worth over £1/4 million). These figures have seemingly been plucked out of the air and seem to bear no relation to the current costs needed to run these cases of these value to those points. What is even more alarming is that he proposes no allowance at all should be made for the fact some types of case are more complex and time consuming than others eg clin neg or contested industrial disease. It is completely hamfisted. You will get a small number of ideal cases which can be profitably run for those fees. For the rest however there will be three equally unjust results. First many meritorious but more complicated case will simply not be taken because of fear that the costs expected to be incurred to get justice will be above the recoverable fixed costs even with a reasonable deduction from the damages. Second in most cases that are taken the client will stand to lose a sizeable chunk of their damages to make it economic for the solicitor to pursue unless the case happens to go particularly smoothly. I envisage many clients losing 49% of the damages to cover shortfall and success fee combined, particularly at the lower end of these scales. Third there will be many cases where the client will end up with a poor service and much less than a fair result because the solicitor is running out of money to continue with the case eg clients will be put under pressure to accept much lower offers than they should with eg the solicitors saying of course you don't have to accept this outrageously low offer but if you want to fight on you may lose every penny of your compensation to pay my costs. Only people with the most warped and diminished sense of justice and very detached from ordinary man and women seriously injured by the negligence of others would propose or accept this. Unfortunately such a man is Lord Justice Jackson and such a man is our Prime Minister who has already shown his utter contempt for all personal injury victims and their lawyers. It will no doubt be one of Cameron's parting gifts bless him!

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