Random Rants
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@Matt You raise an interesting point/emoji.
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@goosehd said in Random Rants:
@Matt Were you a claims adjuster/adjudicator? I bet you must have seen some wild and crazy stuff in 16 years.
Started out as a marine claims adjuster, then onto auto damage, then injury liability, property, property manager, operations manager then finished up with property claims once I burned out and decided to retire early.
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@Matt my advice is don't tell Paula
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@goosehd said in Random Rants:
@EdH …and to continue my thoughts, are those types of cases as prevalent in the UK as in the US? Are there non stop ads on the radio and tv for injury lawyers like here?
It’s a lot more regulated over here, I think. I don’t watch much TV with adverts these days but from what I remember there used to be those sorts of ads somewhat regularly. Various cheesy brand names. Generally we aren’t as litigious. If anything we have too many people who don’t know their rights and will shrug it off if they have a dispute or sort it out between themselves, not necessarily even realising it’s a legal matter or that they’ve been ripped off. Well, at least that’s what someone was saying at an access-to-justice event I went to recently.
Part of the difference here is that we don’t have exemplary damages, which I understand in the US generally ends up paying the lawyers. While here the loser will have to pay the winner’s legal costs most of the time, we have this principle of proportionality, so a judge will look unfavourably on a claim for costs which are a high percentage compared to the value of the damages claim. So if you had a routine £1,000 personal injury claim, say, then the most the lawyer is going to earn is £300 or so. It’s uneconomical for all but the largest firms doing many thousand such cases a year on behalf of insurance companies while paying peanuts to paralegals and using a very sophisticated process to run such cases profitably.