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16 April 2014 / Jeff Zindani
Issue: 7603 / Categories: Opinion , Costs , Personal injury
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Weighted dice

Routinely inflating success fees to get the magic 25% is courting disaster, warns Jeff Zindani

I have presented a series of seminars on the business consequences of the Jackson reforms and have probably lectured to more than 200 lawyers, many of whom are partners or directors in small to medium sized personal injury firms.

A year into the reforms, my concern has been not with the politics of the reforms (what is happening at the coalface is more important), but making sense of how they affect personal injury practices and how they are responding to the changes. My overall message is that personal injury work for claimant lawyers can still be profitable, but firms must “retool” to cope with the largely fixed costs landscape.

Much of this is set out in my book with Professor Dominic Regan on Surviving Jackson (2013, Sun Legal Publishing). In the words of Peter Drucker: “The organisations likely to suffer the most are those with the delusion that tomorrow will

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MOVERS & SHAKERS

Arc Pensions Law—Matthew Swynnerton

Arc Pensions Law—Matthew Swynnerton

Chair of the Association of Pension Lawyers joins as partner

Ampa Group—Kamal Chauhan

Ampa Group—Kamal Chauhan

Group names Shakespeare Martineau partner head of Sheffield office

Blake Morgan—four promotions

Blake Morgan—four promotions

Four legal directors promoted to partner across UK offices

NEWS

The abolition of assured shorthold tenancies and section 21 evictions marks the beginning of a ‘brave new world’ for England’s rental sector, writes Daniel Bacon of Seddons GSC

Stephen Gold’s latest Civil Way column rounds up a flurry of procedural and regulatory changes reshaping housing, alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and personal injury litigation
Patients are being systematically failed by an NHS complaints regime that is opaque, poorly enforced and often stacked against them, argues Charles Davey of The Barrister Group
A wealthy Russian divorce battle has produced a sharp warning about trying to challenge foreign nuptial agreements in the wrong English court. Writing in NLJ this week, Vanessa Friend and Robert Jackson of Hodge Jones & Allen examine Timokhin v Timokhina, where the High Court enforced Russian judgments arising from a prenuptial agreement despite arguments based on the landmark Radmacher decision
An obscure Victorian tort may be heading for an unexpected revival after a significant Privy Council ruling that could reshape liability for dangerous escapes, according to Richard Buckley, barrister and emeritus professor of law at the University of Reading
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