Have you ever wondered why you can’t turn on daytime TV without having some ‘D’ list celebrity ask you if you have had an accident in the last 3 years, or why if you do have an accident and you make one call to your insurers, you are bombarded with phone calls offering to run your claim? The answer is they all want to make money out of your claim and most of them give you nothing, absolutely nothing in return.

Mark Lampkin, Solicitor and owner of Lampkin & Co who are specialist motorcycle accident solicitors tells you the secrets you need to know before you make the first call following an accident.

It is a sad fact of life that the most likely words a biker will hear after landing on the floor are “sorry mate, I didn’t see you”. As the roads become more congested and drivers more stressed, it is a risk we all face as bikers. That is bad enough but I believe that that is only the start of an injured bikers troubles if he makes the wrong call following an accident.

Even before the accidents happen, his fate to end up with second rate representation may already have been sealed, if he made the common, almost inevitable, mistake of taking out legal expenses insurance when he renewed his motorcycle insurance policy. This “scam” of taking £15 to £40 for a non-existent legal expenses insurance policy is scandalous. This nets insurance industries £270 million per year and in my 20 years experience in this industry I have rarely, if ever, seen a valid or legal policy. All these policies do is oblige the biker to call his insurers and use that legal expense insurance for his representation to recover his losses. Believe me, this is just a way of giving the insurers an opportunity to sell the case to a solicitor of their choosing or rather to the solicitor who bids the highest amount.

Paul Asplin who is the Chief Executive of DAS who are a major legal expense insurer is on record as saying that the only income his company receive is from the fees they charge to solicitors to have cases referred to them. The referral fees charged by these companies, who can obviously supply huge amounts of work to solicitors are in the region of £650 to £825. This has now become an enormous consumer protection problem since the government in 2003 introduced a scheme whereby the costs that can be charged by solicitors for looking after bikers was restricted.

The way the solicitor who does the case receives money (provided the case settles for between £1,000 and £10,000 before the issue of court proceedings) is that he will receive £800 plus a figure calculated 20% of any award of damages up to £5,000 and 15% thereafter.

On average any solicitor that does the case will receive £1,300 or thereabouts for a run of the mill accident claim. If this solicitor has paid £650 to receive the case in the first place, this leaves merely £650 with which to fight the case. There are even solicitors now who are paying firms in South Africa to run the case for £500 and merely making the £150 profit.

There are worse practices than this at play particularly with the claims management companies that appear on TV, some of whom not only charge solicitors but also take money from client’s damages. In a report in 2007 by the Law Society, research found that only one out of every hundred cases that lands on a solicitor’s desk will have arrived there without a fee being paid to somebody for nothing. Yes that’s one in a hundred. This money, in my opinion, comes from the legal costs available to be spent on properly representing an injured biker. How can that solicitor give the same service for effectively half the cost?

So how can you ensure that you or your friends are properly looked after if their lives are changed by an accident caused through no fault of their own? There is only one way for that to happen and that is to approach a solicitor directly and one who will offer you a straightforward ‘No win-No fee’ agreement. Any such solicitor will be delighted to roll out the red carpet for you and provide you with a top class service as he is inevitably trained to do and only then can you be assured of absolute dedication to your case. Many solicitors now even offer incentives for you to instruct them directly as they will not have had to pay a referral fee just to get your details, so the answer is simple, go directly to a solicitor, do not allow anyone else be it your insurers, trade union, a claims company, a repair garage, a recovery truck driver, or anyone else to refer you to a solicitor because if you do they are taking money from your case.