Personal injury claims fraudsters?

This isn’t one of our Personal Injury team, but Louis Dempsey from Brighton who was recently jailed for 9 months for faking a fall in an Asda supermarket in Brighton. He claimed he had fallen on water that had leaked onto the supermarket floor but CCTV proved otherwise and he was rightly prosecuted and jailed. The film is easily available on the internet if you have a few minutes and want a good laugh.

There was the much-publicised case of Mohammed Patel from Bolton in 2009 who was jailed for staging 93 accidents to enable motorists to make false injury claims.

The Insurance Industry would have us believe that the majority of people who bring personal injury claims are fraudsters – and indeed some of them treat all claimants as if they are – so I want to give you the benefit of my experience.

I have been dealing with personal injury claims for over 30 years now and none of the clients I or my colleagues have acted for have ever been charged with fraud arising from a claim. Every year our Personal Injury Dept completes hundreds of claims and I can only think of 3 cases where our clients were shown to have made false allegations:

We acted for a lady from West Yorkshire who claimed her ankle injury was caused by a fall on a defective pavement. When we saw her medical records, it was clear that she had fallen over in a night club whilst under the influence of alcohol. We immediately terminated the claim and exercised our right to raise a bill which she is still paying by instalments. We, like most Personal Injury Solicitors, will not act for anyone who we suspect of fraud.

The other cases occurred over 15 years ago. One man was certainly injured, but claimed he was not working until he was filmed at work and he even offered to perform some work for the enquiry agent who was posing as a prospective customer. The third case involved a local man who was injured in an accident but again claimed not to be working until he was filmed attending at a factory on several days. In those cases the claims were settled for much less than the clients were claiming. One of the clients even took the time to come and see me and apologise for his false allegations.

These are just 3 cases out of several thousands I and the rest of our Personal Injury team have been involved in and hopefully this shows that the vast majority of personal injury claimants are genuine and are only claiming the compensation they are legally entitled to (which is of course what the insurers don’t want them to do).

I’m looking to one of our firm’s curry nights this evening which will involve good beer, good people and good food. I suspect breakfast will be later than usual tomorrow.

Have a great weekend

Jonathan Stittle