Legal News

The president of APIL has warned today that the raising of limit for personal injury cases to £5,000 could lead to “catastrophic delays” in the courts.

Karl Tonks said the increase as outlined in the MoJ’s consultation paper on whiplash claims would see a deluge of cases ending up at the small claims court.

If there was a lesson learnt from the family law experience then it would be easy to know that the courts were going to come to a grinding halt and chaos could prevail as a result he said.

The people should understand the system first and any changes which people could struggle to comply with such as the court rules, was not a level playing field, and judges would require to halt proceedings regularly to explain the legal position.

Tonks said that the personal injury lawyers were concerned that the district judges would not be able to level the playing field between unrepresented injury victims and the defendants they faced in court.

As judges are supposed to be obliged to be impartial and fair to all parties it would meant that while they can assist individuals to some extent they cannot actively advise either party.

And there has been a study which found that the judges were reluctant to intervene when one of the parties, usually the defendant, was legally represented.

Mr Tonks added that such proposals could raise confusing injury victims staring into a future possibility of unpleasant experience through the court system and further delayed court proceedings.

The MoJ consultation ‘Reducing the number and cost of whiplash claims’ which closed on Thursday had proposed to increase the small claims limit for all personal injury cases to £5,000, increasing the limit for whiplash claims to £5,000 or keeping the status quo.

APIL said that research showed that by instructing a personal injury lawyer, claimants received on average three times as much as they did by accepting the first offer made to them by insurers.
The consultation paper also suggested that whiplash claims should be referred to independent medical panels, using standard forms
Meanwhile, an early day motion in the Commons signed by five Labour and two Liberal Democrat MPs called on the government to carry out an impact assessment on the Jackson reforms before making further changes to the system.