How did the lawyers greet the changes? Let’s open the Moet!
PERSONAL injury lawyers celebrated Liz Truss’s announcement yesterday, with one saying he would ‘open the Moet’.
Peter Todd, a partner at London legal firm Hodge Jones and Allen LLP, sent a tweet to Vidisha Joshi, his company’s managing partner, saying: ‘Is it too early to open the Moet?’
She replied: ‘It’s midday somewhere in the world.’
Mr Todd’s tweet has since been deleted, and he insists he was simply ‘expressing his delight’ that those with life-changing injuries will be properly compensated.
Experts fear the rate change will provoke a flood of personal injury claims.
And Anthony Wright, the Association of British Insurers’ head of communication, said: ‘It’s shocking that within minutes of the announcement the ambulance-chasers were already talking about opening champagne, especially as businesses, taxpayers and millions of motorists will foot the bill.’
Mr Todd, 49, who lives in a £1.3million cottage in a village near Milton Keynes, and is married with three children, said his profession will not make more money because of the change because they did not take a percentage cut of clients’ compensation payouts.
He said he had never received a percentage cut of someone’s compensation and neither had his firm, and that he received the same fee regardless of the amount of compensation given.
This is a type of no-win no-fee agreement called a conditional fee agreement (CFA) where a client is charged a set ‘success fee’.
Speaking about his tweet, Mr Todd said: ‘It is good news for innocent victims of serious injuries that they will no longer have their compensation run out before the need has ceased, or have to risk losing their compensation in risky investment gambles which may cause them to lose their compensation altogether.’
But industry insiders said other lawyers did take a percentage of the payout, meaning they could earn millions more thanks to Miss Truss’s announcement.