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Injury lawyers to access car insurance fraudster data27 Oct 2011by Donald MacKenzie Personal injury lawyers are to be given access to the  Insurance Fraud
Bureau (IFB) database to help them to identify potentially fraudulent car insurance
claims.According to a report in today's Law Society Gazette, at a meeting brokered by the Motor Accident Solicitors Society (MASS), it was agreed that injury lawyers should be given access to the same industry-wide claims data that insurance providers use to identify potential claims fraud. Car insurance fraud is estimated to cost motorists more than £350m each year and injury lawyers have long argued that they should be given access to this kind of data as part of their case assessment as it can otherwise be late in the course of legal proceedings when the defendent car insurance company discloses this information which, had it been shared earlier, could have helped to reduce legal costs by nipping fraudulent cases in the bud much earlier in their course. The Chair of MASS, Donna Scully commented: "For too long now the claimant community has been excluded from intelligence on fraud… we felt that a meeting to bring everyone together could be a golden opportunity to try and break down the barriers and proactively work as an industry to combat fraud." This initiative has been widely welcomed despite one prominent injury lawyer, ex-MP Andrew Dismore of the Access to Justice Action Group (AJAG), arguing that an alleged high incidence of claims fraud is in large part unfounded insurance industry spin. IFB director, Glen Marr, was also positive about the collaboration seeing the sharing of claims data as "a logical and achievable step." The IFB plans further meetings next year to determine how the data sharing can be rolled out; while the Association of British Insurers (ABI), that was also involved in the meeting, will be watching with interest as they will also be collecting national claims fraud data themselves from early next year and it would be logical for them to consider a similar collaboration if it might usefully add to the data available from the IFB. The meeting was attended by numerous other stakeholders, including Allianz Insurance, the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL), the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Ministry of Justice, the Law Society, the Forum of Insurance Lawyers, the Claims Standards Council, the police and the National Fraud Authority. The timing of this meeting is significant. The Government's current Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill includes all of Lord Justice Jackson's recommendations including the late addition of a legal referral fee ban. Its impact will be to reduce the level of risk that injury lawyers can accept for those cases they agree to represent. 'No win, no fee' success fees will be paid, under the new arrangements, from damages-based contingency fee agreements rather than as currently where the unsuccessful defendant (car insurance provider) pays the success fee. Because the success fee will be less under the new arrangements, this will reduce the money 'in the kitty' available to injury lawyers to pursue more speculative cases. Access to IFB claims checks for those potential clients where lawyers have doubts as to their authenticity, will, arguably, be essential for claims lawyers in order to help them to identify the higher risk attached to some of the cases they might otherwise have pursued without knowledge of past claims. That MASS was the driving force behind this initiative makes it likely that they see this IFB-supported enhanced risk assessment as necessary under the new Jackson-related legal fee arrangements. A useful positive Public Relations (PR) side-effect of this developement for injury lawyers is that having been criticised for accepting large fees for facilitating compensation claims in marginal cases, especially for whiplash that cannot be clinically disproved, they can now claim back the moral high ground arguing that they are working hard to identify those cases likely to be spurious. |
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