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Of course there was a gravy train. I was part of it, so I should know.

In the days when CFA's first came in (the worst thing that ever happened to personal injury claims) it was exceptionally easy with those absurd success fees to bill £300 an hour or more for pathetically simple grunt work.

I was always receiving emails from recruiters offering me PI fee-earners (many unqualified) looking for salaries of £30k to £40k who were grossing £200k to £300k. All you needed to do was fill an industrial unit with such people and you had a money making machine like no other.

This is why PI work became such a corrupt industry. There was way too much easy money sloshing around, and it attracted shysters like sh*t attracts flies. They in turn spawned all the offshoots of corruption – the credit hire companies owned by solicitors, CMC’s, occupational therapists who were indirectly employed by solicitors, doctors who wrote `medical reports’ that were full of lies because that’s what their paymasters demanded, etc etc.

And yes, that gravy train has now well and truly hit the buffers. I'm afraid that firms like Thompsons are likely to be insolvent within a couple of years, quite possibly less.

Despite my criticism of the industry as it now is that really is a crying shame. Before the industry was corrupted - when people got paid a reasonable amount for a reasonable job - firms like Thompsons were quite rightly respected as genuine professionals. Even now they probably contain some of the best PI talent in the country, and such people will survive and prosper, but in massively slimmed down specialist firms that are doing proper legal work, not portal RTA claims.

The cretins in government that decided CFA's were a good replacement for legal aid should be hanging their heads in shame. But no doubt they are all now knights of the realm, dripping with various `honours'.