Dominic Regan welcomes the government’s u-turn on referral fees
The payment of referral fees in personal injury cases is to be banned. Yet again Lord Justice Jackson has got what he wants. This may presage other seismic shifts.
The position in Whitehall in the summer of 2010 was that solicitors who wanted to spend their money to secure work should be free to do so. In his report Common Sense, Common Safety last autumn
Lord Young identified concerns:
- Those who paid out the most got the most.
- A firm handing out these fees got one hundred times more cases than those who didn’t pay fees.
- There was no correlation between payment and quality of work. Indeed, the higher fee remitted meant that the balance left to cover the cost of doing a proper job for the client was severely diminished.
Earlier this year the Legal Services Board published a report suggesting that since claimants were not bothered about these fees (which were borne by their own solicitor) we should leave be and have another look in 2013 (see Referral fees,
