Normally, PI lawyers like a bit of carnage. Grist to the mill, as the saying goes.
But fears of a different and unwelcome kind of carnage, one posing something approaching an existential threat to the money making prospects of PI people up and down the land, have been circulating ever since the advent of the Jackson Actions and the Portal Fees Diminishment Decree.
Dire predictions of PI market carnage failed at first to bear fruit in the so-called Wake of Jackson. The suspicion is, however, that this is simply a case of carnage postponed, rather than carnage averted. “The carnage is yet to happen,” Ian Pryer of Pork-based Pryers Solicitors confirmed to a recent ’round table’ hosted by Thirst4Lawyers.
In much the same way that the earth’s finite resources of fossil fuels are showing signs of holding out a tad longer than expected, cases pre-dating the post-Jackson era are continuing to provide some kind of short-term cash-quick income for many in the PI sector.
This seems to be a) because PI fee earners are operating some kind of undeclared three-day week that enables them to eke out pre-Jackson work a little longer, and b) because fresh supplies of cases dating back to prelapsarian times are still being flushed out, like some kind of PI shale gas.
“A lot of people had thought the [hoard of cases squirrelled away in the run up to the recent reforms] would have disappeared more quickly,” Pryer confirmed, giving PI firms who have failed to diversify a few more months of viability until “two years on from Jackson.”
Then we’ll see some proper carnage.
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