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All the arguments in these comments seem to be unable to see the wood for the trees.

The fundamental point is that it is utterly absurd to charge £70k for a claim that's only worth £3k, and even more so to expect insurers to pay such a bill.

It's all very well Pure Truth and others saying well that's what it costs because of all the overheads, regulation and so on, so just cough up. If that's the case then the simple answer is that such claims shouldn’t be handled by solicitors at all. If their services are so expensive then they should be reserved for cases where the amounts at stake are large enough to justify them.

This isn’t to criticise the work done by Thompsons, which was no doubt very competent, or even to say that they were deliberately overcharging. But they and PI lawyers generally seem to think that they have some sort of God given right to make a living at the expense of insurers. They don't.

If solicitors can't negotiate settlements of low value claims like this at a reasonable cost then they should stop doing the work. It's probably long overdue that small claims - say up to £25k in value - should be assessed by an independent panel rather than be litigated over.

And the arguments about insurers spinning it out and denying liability etc can be simply disposed of by the Claimant making a well judged Part 36 Offer. But this still rarely happens in practice, and I'm quite sure that one of the reasons is that the solicitor doesn't actually want a quick settlement. It's generally (or at least it used to be) far more profitable to spin it out and rack up lots of costs.

PI lawyers have been living in an artificial world for decades. They are one of the only sectors of the profession that never has to justify their costs to their clients, but when I was doing this work in the `good old days’ (and for once that phrase is accurate) the insurers treated us fairly because we actually acted fairly and could generally be trusted. But the sheer greed induced by CFA's, success fees etc, the arrival of so many outright fraudsters in the profession and the disgraceful inflation in costs that stemmed from those disastrous reforms has finally killed the goose that laid what was an extremely large golden egg.