No pay no way? (Published 20/02/06)

Last week I wrote about how you should avoid accident claims companies and come direct to a solicitor instead if you have had an accident. After all, all the claims companies do is pass your claim on to a solicitor. So you may as well choose your own solicitor and cut out the middleman.

Look at it this way: the solicitors who get referrals of cases from accident compensation companies are getting them because they pay for them. Do you really want a solicitor who has to pay to get the work?

Surely common sense suggests you are better off going to a solicitor who doesn't pay. Why would a solicitor have to pay to get work, if he was good at it? A good solicitor doesn't have to pay to get work. He is known for doing a good job and gets enough work to keep him busy from referrals via word of mouth. A not-so-good solicitor will not do as well by reputation alone, so he may well be tempted to buy cases from an accident company. But would you really want to hire him?

So the long and the short of it seems to me that if you really want to guarantee yourself a solicitor who isn't good enough to get by on the strength of the quality of his work alone spreading his name, then you go to an accident company. But who really wants one of those?

Most people, I think, want a solicitor who is totally independent and good enough to keep busy on his own repute. They don't want a paying lackey of an accident company.

So how do you choose one of these good solicitors? The easy answer is that you ask. The solicitors, like Wilsons, who have never paid for referrals from accident companies are proud to say so. The ones that do pay them will probably prefer to avoid the subject if they possibly can. So ask, and if you don't get a straight answer, go elsewhere.

Needless to say, no solicitor or office of Wilsons solicitors has ever paid an accident company a penny. Ever! We don't need to, as many satisfied clients will testify.