Radio - Nicholas Jervis talks 'Compensation Culture' with Talk Sport Radio

Radio Transcript

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Host: We are now joined by Nick Jervis, director of Loyalty Law, Nick welcome to the show.

Nicholas Jervis: Thank you very much.

Host: Thanks for coming on and trying to help us make sense of this. For most people, beyond a limited amount that they read in the paper and see on the telly and hear on the radio, legality and legal language can be highly confusing so Lord Young, who is working on behalf of the Prime Minister, is reviewing health & safety law and the government is basically attacking the no win no fee system.

Nicholas Jervis: That’s entirely right. There are two parts to it, a big part is looking at health and safety and the other part is talking about this so called compensation culture which I would say doesn’t actually exist, there is no compensation culture.

Host: Because it feels like there is Nick.

Nicholas Jervis: The trouble is that the media like the juicy stories or the more exciting stories, so they will pick up on what might sound like a frivolous claim but the vast majority of claims are by genuine people who have suffered an injury, can’t work, and need compensation to be able to pay the bills, but that’s not very exciting.

Host: But it’s not just the media is it, it’s the profession itself, if you watch daytime telly during the day there is a hawkish attitude to trying to get people to think that if they have ever tripped over in the street, they are entitled to £30,000 or whatever, it is non-stop advertising either on financial products or injury lawyers etc.

Nicholas Jervis: It certainly does seem to stack up the daytime television but the important part of any compensation claim is that there has to be a legal basis to it and we’ve got a system which has been developed over centuries which tells us whether a claim can be made or not so the frivolous ones make the news but only the genuine ones can ever get anywhere.

Host: But some of these frivolous ones are successful sometimes aren’t they, I mean there must be some times where you have almost been amazed at the decision?

Nicholas Jervis: Thankfully that really is few and far between, the basic law says there’s got to be a duty of care, there has to have been a breach of that duty and that duty has to have caused someone to have suffered an injury or suffer loss. So the things that get picked up like, you might remember, the cheese rolling in Gloucester, it was said that might have to be stopped because somebody might get injured and it would cost too much but the real story was that the police couldn’t police the number of people that turned up to watch it so what gets picked up and what’s the truth is often not the same thing.

Host: Indeed but there is no doubt ... but firstly what started all this, there was none of this when I was growing up, all these adverts on telly, it’s been a relatively recent development in this country in the history of this country, this no win no fee culture, where can it be traced back to?

Nicholas Jervis: Absolutely, but firstly solicitors could never promote their services in any way, shape or form until the 80s so until that time solicitors could not advertise their services they had to get their work from being in a certain location in a town but the major shift or change happened when the government wanted to abolish legal aid so they wanted to stop funding accident victims from making a claim so they had to come up with an alternative and the alternative was the no win no fee system and because lawyers had not been allowed to advertise for quite some time and really weren’t that good at it a lot of business people and claims companies realised they could promote the services and then pass on the leads to solicitors for a fee. So they would do the marketing for the solicitors and the solicitors kind of liked that because it allowed them to do the bit that they liked which was look after the clients, the accident victims, and the work was given to them but obviously now it’s a much bigger industry and attracts much more media attention.

Host: It must generate a lot of money because otherwise we wouldn’t see all of these adverts on the telly all the time. I mean, it must have been a revolution for lawyers in terms of... well they’ve always been able to command very good fees of course, but have a lot of people got very rich off the back of that piece of legislation?

Nicholas Jervis: I’d say in the main, no. The type of people that we work with at Loyalty Law are your average size high street firm they might have one, two or three offices, they are people that have entered the profession to look after clients, some of them make a reasonable living but again it’s a perception that all lawyers are filthy rich and I know for certain that that’s not the case but I’m not saying they don’t make a good living, they survive and still serve the public or they wouldn’t keep doing it but it’s not the case that the partners of law firms all drive around in Ferraris by any stretch.

Host: No. Is there any risk, if I am a member of the public, if I see an advert on telly and think I’ve fallen over in a nightclub, even though I was battered, I fancy getting some money is there any risk to me financially?

Nicholas Jervis: The way the scheme is set up the only risk is your time and your effort in pursuing the claim.

Host: So you’re never going to end up owing money or anything like that?

Nicholas Jervis: It depends, if you are going to make a fraudulent claim and there wasn’t actually an accident that you could blame anyone else for then there is a risk there, but if you said I want to make a claim you might have to pay some expenses but generally, the way the scheme is set up, and because the no win no fee system was set up to get rid of the government’s need to pay legal aid for cases generally the lawyer takes the risk, so the lawyer runs the risk of taking the claim and if he doesn’t win then he doesn’t get paid.

Host: The problem is with all the adverts on the television it just adds to the impression that there is something wrong with society that there is loads of people out there claiming for this sort of thing, everyone falls over in their life, everyone gets hit every now and then but we don’t all go around suing each other, it’s almost like a threat to the morality of the nation without wanting to go too far. There must be loads of people on the scrounge.

Nicholas Jervis: The figures just don’t support that at all, the figures show that around 30% of people that could claim for compensation actually do so, so there is a huge proportion of people that are injured in a car accident, rear end shunt for example is a common one and they just don’t bother claiming for their whiplash injury.

Host: Because they’re a decent human being.

Nicholas Jervis: Well because they think they don’t want the hassle. The compensation culture myth, what it does is it very nicely supports the insurance industry because if they can stop just 5 or 10 % of people from making a claim when they are entitled to then the insurance companies don’t have to pay out and as we all know, although that’s what insurance companies are there to do, if they avoid paying out at all then that suits they balance sheets very nicely.

Host: Doesn’t it create a bad mentality that any minor things that happen to you the first thing you think is I’m going to sue you. Is this really the sort of world we want to live in?

Nicholas Jervis: As I say most because people don’t claim, that’s the perception not the reality.

Host: Ah but there must be plenty of people that do.

Nicholas Jervis: There are plenty of people that aren’t entitled and the solicitor would say to them there is just no claim. I mean I remember in my 14 years of practising I occasionally had people coming in, probably not so often then, and I said that someone has to be to blame for the accident. Like the incident you mentioned, if you fall over in a nightclub that’s your own fault so I would happily turn people away and say there is no-one to blame here but yourself, that is what we call an accident. If there is no one else at fault then you can’t claim compensation and the law makes sure that people can’t make these frivolous claims because it has to tick all the boxes and you can imagine if a judge got a frivolous claim they just won’t entertain it they would just kick it out.

Host: Nick, finally, lawyers get a very hard time from the media, I think of the people that I went to university with and I think of all the people that I’ve met in my life that want to be lawyers and one thing that’s always struck me, and this is not necessarily for you, so I’m giving you the chance here to defend the profession. Whenever I’ve asked anyone why they want to study law they say because of the money. I’ve never met anyone who says, you know what there are people out there that are getting hurt and getting injuries and are not getting a fair deal from the legal system and I want to stand up for those people, there must be some of you like that.

Nicholas Jervis: I don’t know what university you went to or what you studied but the vast majority of solicitors I meet are really good people, they enjoy what they do, they enjoy helping people and we focus on the small stuff but a lot of these solicitors are really helping people to rebuild their lives. You know, if someone has lost a limb or two limbs, I’ve had horrific cases in my time in the law and our solicitors in Loyalty Law have to help these people, you are genuinely helping people to rebuild their lives and that gives them massive satisfaction in their job, obviously you’ve got to get paid to pay the bills but if the satisfaction of helping someone as far as possible to get on with their lives and put the accident behind them and that’s what the majority of solicitors I work with and certainly Loyalty Law solicitors are trying to do.

Host: It’s good to hear it Nick. Thanks very much for coming on. Have a good weekend. Cheers, bye.

Nicholas Jervis: Cheers, bye.

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