Shamed, lawyers who demanded £142k af ter client tripped on pothole

AN ‘ ambulance- chasing’ law firm tried to fleece taxpayers out of £120,000 in legal costs over a simple compensation claim for a man who said he tripped on a pothole, it emerged yesterday.

Robert Barnard, 30, instructed personal injury solicitors Universa Law to sue Stockport Council for £22,500 after he apparently broke his nose in a fall in the town in July 2011.

But the ‘no win, no fee’ lawyers spent four years fighting the case and tried to secure more than five times that amount f rom the public purse f or themselves.

A judge threw the case out of court after hearing that the street where the accident happened had been inspected just nine months earlier. He ordered Mr Barnard to pay the council’s legal costs of £11,000 – a fraction of those of his own solicitors.

Yesterday council chiefs criticised the practices of personal injury lawyers as it emerged that the case was one of three successfully defended by Stockport Council’s l awyers i n recent weeks.

In another case, Broad York- shire Law, based in Sheffield, tried to earn £67,000 in fees while claiming damages of only £5,500 for its client, who failed to prove he suffered an ankle injury after tripping on a broken pavement.

Manchester-based GLP Solicitors tried to recover £30,000 in fees for a 32-year-old man who wanted £3,250 compensation for tripping over a pothole.

Iain Roberts, deputy leader of Stockport Council, hit out at the ‘unscrupulous’ lawyers, saying local people would have suffered if the claims had been allowed.

The authority needs to make £39 million in cuts over the next two years. Since April 2011, 956 people have lost their jobs with the council, almost 25 per cent of the total workforce.

Cllr Roberts said: ‘Exaggerated personal injury claims and the huge costs that go with them underline the fact that we must take a hard line against unscrupulous l egal actions. Some of these legal claims would have really taken us to the cleaners and the sad fact is that it would have been taxpayers who would have suffered.

‘Some of these ambulancechasing lawyers are encouraging claims like these. These people, and the huge scale of their cost claims, are taking money from those who are most vulnerable.’

All three law firms declined to comment.