In the proud British tradition of cutting out middlemen, Her Majesty’s Government has given the green light to a new portal, funded by insurers, that will allow personal injury claimants who can’t afford a lawyer to ask insurers directly whether they feel like paying them some compensation.
Whereas the current claims portal can only be accessed by expensively trained claimant lawyers, this new one will be open to any injured (or purportedly injured person) who fancies their chances against insurers’ claims and legal teams.
Insurers have generously offered to fund and set up a new ‘user-friendly’ portal that gives low-value PI claimants a seamless customer-oriented way of finding out whether defendant insurers fancy paying them some money for their probably fictitious injuries.
Predictably, this visionary new proposal has encountered resistance from vested interests like lawyers who seem to think they have some kind of god-given right to a role in the legal process, and from sinister lobby groups like Axis II Justice (A2J) who never miss a chance to have a little moan.
Couching their complaints in characteristically unhinged and inflammatory language, A2J have branded the new portal plans ‘crazy’ and are shamelessly seeking to impugn insurers’ ability to administer the system with due impartiality.
With a lot of wild talk about foxes and hen houses, A2J’s Andy Twammbly claims the Ministry of Justice is abdicating its responsibility to “uphold our legal system” and “handing the defendant sector the opportunity and the toolkit to decide how the law is administered.”
Upsetting as all this may seem to the ambulance chasing fraternity, it clearly makes sense to remove lawyers from the claims equation (along with all the complexity, expense and tedious insistence of legal niceties they inevitably bring).
And, in reality, this is merely the logical (and entirely sensible) extension of insurers’ longstanding practice of approaching PI claimants directly and thereby saving everyone the nuisance and aggravation of having lawyers crawling all over everything.
If you ask Bankstone News, a parallel process of disintermediation could usefully be applied to many other areas of national life.
Sick people could avoid all the frustration and delay of seeing a GP by simply turning up at hospital with their self-diagnosed conditions.
Voters could eliminate MPs by congregating at Westminster and having their say in person.
Citizens could punish miscreants and enforce the law without getting the police involved.
Rather than join the Army, people who want to defend their country could simply grab a gun and get on with it.
We could certainly save some money that way.
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