Mr Sean Kehoe, Senior Partner at specialist personal injury firm Advance Legal has said:



?One of our personal injury lawyers has just demonstrated why it is that clients need a Solicitor to act for them and cannot safely negotiate their own accident claim with the insurer. Our client was injured whilst a passenger on a train. The train hit the buffer stop which caused our client to be thrown forward, resulting in him hitting his head and knee.

Before instructing us, the client had tried to pursue his own case and had been in negotiations with the insurance company's representative. They started off offering him next to nothing, but through his own efforts he was able to increase their offer to ?500. He then rang us, as personal injury specialists, just to get confirmation that the injury compensation that he was being offered was good enough. He assumed it was.

We calculated the likely value of his compensation claim and told him to reject the offer. We then took on his personal injury claim and contacted the insurers ourselves. Lo and behold, the case ended recently with our client being paid ?3,000 damages for his accident claim ? six times what the insurer had offered him! It was a big surprise to him, but not to us.

We are finding that this kind of story is happening more and more often. The insurance industry has been trying for a long time to change the system for compensation claims and to deal with Claimants themselves directly. Their argument is that this will ?promote efficiency? and result in claims being settled much faster. Translated into English, that means that Claimants will be paid perhaps one sixth or less of what their accident claims are really worth.

The moral of the story is that you should never agree a compensation claim directly with an insurance company without at least checking it first with a specialist personal injury firm. Better still; do not even attempt to enter into discussions on your own. Many insurers will seek to persuade you to settle your injury claim without even seeing a doctor to provide a report.

You would imagine, after all these years, that we would be able to think of at least one or two cases where an insurer had offered the client damages which we felt able to recommend them to accept. In fact that has never happened! We have never seen a single case where the insurer has offered a fair amount on its own without a solicitor involved. In this particular case, we got six times as much as the client had been able to negotiate. On average we will tend to get at least twice as much and usually three to four times as much or more.?