Joneseys blog

If you’ve renewed your car or house insurance recently then no doubt you were asked if you wanted to pay a small extra premium for legal expenses insurance (often called LEI). You may wonder if it’s actually worthwhile, so I thought I’d write this guide to set out what it’s all about but also to point out one or two pitfalls that you may not be aware of.

The basic idea is simple – if you’ve got the insurance and you need a lawyer then they’ll pay the lawyers fees.

Of course there’s no such thing as a free lunch so there are normally exclusions – it will only cover certain types of problems and they will be set out on the policy itself – each one is different but typically it would be employment disputes, injury claims, complaints about products bought or maybe boundary disputes.. They will also want to make sure that you’ve got a reasonable chance of winning – they aren’t interested in paying for you to spend all your time suing people

So what are the pitfalls?

Pitfall number 1:-
It’s worthwhile checking the policy covers what you’re likely to need it for. If it’s being thrown in for free then you might just want to leave it – it’s something for nothing after all. But if you’re paying for it then there’s probably not much point in paying for it if it only covers you for stuff you don’t need. The only problem with this is, at the time you’re taking on the policy, chances are you’re speaking to someone in a call centre who doesn’t have the policy in front of them and is more likely to tell you it covers everything. When the policy comes through though it’s worth checking yourself though.

Pitfall number 2 (and this is the biggie):-
Which solicitor you can use. The beauty of these policies is that you can use your own solicitor and the policy will cover you. The problem is that sometimes insurance companies backing the policy have been known to put pressure on people to use their ‘pet’ solicitors. Allegedly. And if you’ve just had an accident and are looking into claiming on the policy then those awfully nice people from the insurance company can be very persuasive.

Whenever we start acting for a client on an accident claim, one of the first things we have to do is to check whether they have legal expenses insurance.

It works well because you can get a deal where we act for you and it costs you nothing – but to make that work you have to take out insurance to pay the other side’s legal costs just in case your case goes wrong.

It’s a great idea as if you win, this insurance and all the other costs are paid for by the other side, and if you lose, the insurance is designed to pay for itself and your expenses in bringing the claim.

But every single time we make these checks with the Insurance provider, the Legal Expenses Insurance provider contacts our clients and tells them that they MUST use the Insurance company’s ‘pet’ solicitors and not their own Solicitor.

Just to put the record straight – THIS IS RUBBISH

You can use whoever you like when you like and how you like.

It’s called freedom of choice.

We don’t know why the Insurance Companies want the work to go through their own solicitors – it could be that they supply them with so much work they are able to put pressure on them to control how they work (but remember they’re meant to be working for you), or it could be they are earning money from each referral – as we are not involved in that process we don’t know.

This pressure being put on clients has been happening for some time now, but now it is getting worse.

Today I had a call from a client who has used us loads of times before. She is very local to us and really happy with what we have done for her before.

Sadly she and her son had an accident and as normal we checked out the LEI.

Within the next few days she had numerous calls to say that she couldn’t use Fidler and Pepper and had to use whoever they told her under the LEI policy – and that was someone a long long way from where she lives.

Then, when she told them where to go, they started to text her son who is quite young (16 years old!) and telling him he couldn’t use the solicitor that his Mother had organised

5 times these people contacted our client and her teenage son begging them to use them after they had instructed us and she had told them very clearly where to go.

It makes you wonder how much benefit they are actually getting out of sending the case to their own solicitors.

If you have had a Personal Injury and want to see if you can claim using your Legal Expenses Insurance fill in the contact form on our site or just phone me or my staff to talk it through.