I’m ashamed. To be held in such contempt. Maybe I should be ashamed. At least, the person who said this would seem to think so.

It didn’t appear to occur to him – as he told the story about “one of those NO WIN NO FEE solicitors” – that this could be me.

It wasn’t me, infact, so, perhaps there are some reasons to be cheerful, as Ian Drury might have said!

In this context I find my heart sinks when I read about Claim Today Solicitors (CTS) who have commenced a £1m marketing campaign.

£1m. Yes. One million pounds. That’s what the Law Society Gazette article says.

So where does that come from? A modest lifestyle? Charitable donations?

CTS’s website tells us they’ve been “serving the public living in Britain since 1999” . Serving. That what they say, serving. Perhaps not unlike the oracle of Delphi, or maybe the local binmen.

They “offer premium service to our clients”. Premium. Which means? Try another marketing badge – how about “Gold service”. Ooh. That sounds glossy.

They are “highly skilled and experienced Solicitors who have worked in this area of law for a substantial length of time” and they “have a long list of satisfied clients who have benefited from our services”.

Oh God! They must be sooo goooood at what they do.

Sorry, I get carried away from time to time. Too much truth in a marketing script is a little hard to swallow.

But. Sorry, I just can’t help finding a but.

Worst still – yes, worse – I read in the Gazette’s article: “the abolition of success fees paid by defendants will stop claimants from making legitimate claims” – the words of Rob Bohl MD of CTS. The head of The Team – check out the website. Please do.

What nonsense!

I have said many times – and I’m sure I’ll have to say it again many more times – success fees are – only ever were – incidental.

Yes, there was a theory that success fees were about balancing wins and losses. But in truth that was never the case. The absurd formulas used to calculate a reasonable success fee are just so many angels on pinheads – and, frankly, I’m pretty sure the people who put forward the arguments are incarnations of the same souls whose bloodletting drove the Christian church forward from the 2nd century all the way up to the Reformation!

It’s simply not true that before 1995 when CFA’s – Conditional Fee Agreements – the formal name for the NO WIN NO FEE revolution – were made lawful – as I said, it’s simply not true that legitimate claimants were prevented from making claims before either CFA’s came into existence or success fees were made recoverable.

And by the way, what about LEI – Legal Expense Insurance – I won’t bore you with the explanation – but LEI means no success fee and yet strangely cases get fought.

Some months ago I attended a conference about the future of Claims Management Companies post Jackson. I was not impressed. But a gentleman from the opposition – to be specific – from Keoghs – that whiter than white thoroughbred amongst us gutter mulish lawyers – this significant man from Keoghs kept saying there’s just too much fat in the system, it should be cut out.

Depressingly, given the prejudice of the MoJ against all Claimant lawyers, Mr Rob Bohl’s CTS marketing campaign is compelling evidence that Mr Keogh is right.

Of course, there is a much more simple and much more cynical interpretation of the £1m marketing campaign. It’s about profile and new business. Look at our righteousness, you can come to us – we – CTS – the campaigners for Justice. Ho ho ho!

Business business business. It’s just business Guv, nothing personal. Not the slightest hint of the spiv. No win no fee. Spiv. Nah! What a ridiculous association. All a bit of a con. Something for nuthin’. Business. We’re just doing our job, ain’t we? Earning a crust.

The man who told me the story that featured “one of those NO WIN NO FEE solicitors”, I’ve known for a couple of decades now. He’s a bastion of respectability. A hint of paternalism. A touch of the clergyman out of Jane Austen, or George Elliot, or perhaps even Trollope – not the recent chick-litish lightweight, but the real Trollope, Anthony, the one who wrote The Way We Live Now, a novel about loss of faith in Victorian “values” – the malign central character Augustus Melmotte – a practiced fraudster and confidence trickster – not unlike bankers of today.

My friend is a bona fide right thinking fellow. And charming, too. And, yes, I respect his opinion. He’s not a backward-looking private school educated middle-class middle-aged man who reads the Torygraph and does a posh imitation of Victor Meldrew when commenting on, well, anything.

His view of “one of those NO WIN NO FEE solicitors” isn’t his alone, it’s shared by most people from any social background that I ever meet. People from all walks of life have trouble holding back the sneers. Its bad enough to be a lawyer – parasites by nature – but personal injury! Claims!

What do you do?
Oh you’re a lawyer.
What kind of law?
Accident claims, oh – so your “one of those NO WIN NO FEE solicitors”.

What became of social justice? Those tens of thousands of coal miners with wrecked lungs. Vibration white finger. Asbestos. That whole dictionary of medical terms coined because of the abuses and ignorance and greed of the industrial and post industrial society.

The coup de gras in the conversation featuring “one of those NO WIN NO FEE solicitors” was that letters my friend received were almost illiterate. Replies to letters had to answers questions that hadn’t been asked because the illiterate writer of the letters had an insufficient command of the English language to be able to formulate what the right questions were!

How unusual is this? Specialist Claimant solicitors businesses run out of warehouses.

I worked in one once. It wasn’t actually a warehouse but the senior partner – a brilliant man in his own right – managed it as though it was, and had a vision of precisely this – a warehouse full of operatives.

Monkeys and Shakespeare come to mind.

Is it surprising that Jackson is going to happen? Is it surprising that the right wing Con-Dem MoJ are swatting lawyers like so many bluebottles?

John Holtom

The image used for this post is borrowed from this website: http://www.caperture.net/
Which does not appear to have any terms of use however is there is any issue concerning it’s use I will, of course, be more than happy to remove it at once.

Article posted on Thursday, January, 5th, 2012 at 9:29 am

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