Legal Expense Insurance – the Great Insurance Scam!

Heard about the Insurance scam where the Insurance Companies scam you -the unsuspecting innocent policy holder. Have you been told that you have a legal expense policy attached to your car insurance? Have you bought a legal expense insurance policy and been told by your insurance company that they will pay your legal fees in pursuing a personal injury claim? You may be surprised to learn the ugly truth about LEI. LEI is a sham, pure and simple.

The truth is that LEI is really about selling your injury claim. LEI is simply a mechanism for you to contact your insurers and for them to take the claim details and to sell these onto the highest bidder. It’s a way for your insurance company to profit from your injury. By telling you that you have legal cover, they get you to automatically contact them to give them the details of your accident; or they call you and tell you that you are already have legal cover to pursue a claim. They then sell on your contact and accident details to a firm that is prepared to buy your claim.

Unfortunately, many law firms (not all) are willing to buy your claim from your insurance company; so your insurers get a backhander and profit from your injury, and all for the privilege of selling on your details. Both your insurance company and the Solicitors are supposed to tell you about the payment by your Solicitors but from our experience they never do. We have yet to hear of a Client that has been told by the Solicitors or the insurers that there injury claim was sold on!

Worst of all and the biggest kick in the teeth, is that the problem with these types of firms is that they buy your injury claim for so much money (anywhere around £600.00) that they no longer have this money to spend on your claim. It’s easy to work out that if a firm buys your case for around £600.00, then that is £600.00 less in the pot that the Solicitors can spend on running your claim.

The firms that pay these massive referral fees demanded by insurers for your injury claims, actually make very little on each case because of the extremely high cost of acquiring the case. They have to get in as many claims and spend as little time on each claim as possible and this may mean cutting corners.

Cutting corners may mean:

• Employing young unqualified staff




• High case volumes for there staff to handle




• Poor Client contact




• Missing out the individual elements of your claim




• Resulting poor service

They make so little per claim because since October 2003, the base costs that Solicitors get for running road traffic accidents has been fixed (except in exceptional circumstances) to £800.00. If firms are buying cases for £600.00 they stand to make very little on a claim that they will be funding and running in some cases for a considerable period of time. Independent firms that don’t buy claims from insurers, can actually spend time on your claim; looking at each case individually; keeping you updated regularly; spending time negotiating with the other insurers and ensuring you get the best result.

You could choose the Solicitors that your insurance company have selected, in the knowledge that your insurers are profiting from your injury and as a result the selected Solicitors have less money to spend on your claim from day 1. OR you can choose an independent Solicitors with no middlemen and no backhanders!

The Injury Lawyers are independent personal injury claims experts that also deal with car accident claims.