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PI Brief Update

Get Out of Jail Free Card

Yesterday I had my third case in as many weeks in which a Defendant successfully claimed that he’d had a blackout at the wheel. Automatism they call it. ‘Simply not my fault, mate.’ More like a get out of jail free card if you ask me. That’s certainly how it felt today when a seriously injured claimant failed to get anything due to this technicality. Worse, the robing room chat with a few other barristers afterwards was that they’ve also seen a lot of these cases. Always the same expert and the same insurance company behind it. One barrister even went so far as to suggest that he’d represented that insurance company and discovered that there’s a new claims handler been brought in from (of all places) FakeClaims&Co to shake things up with the promise of a big bonus if he significantly reduces payouts.

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops.

BabyBarista is a fictional account of a junior barrister written by Tim Kevan. You can buy the latest BabyBarista novel, 'Law and Peace' on Amazon. The cartoons are by Alex Williams, author of The Queen's Counsel Lawyer's Omnibus.

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The opinions expressed in the articles are the authors' own, not those of Law Brief Publishing Ltd, and are not necessarily commensurate with general legal or medico-legal expert consensus of opinion and/or literature. Any medical content is not exhaustive but at a level for the non-medical reader to understand. 

Professional advice should always be obtained before applying any information to particular circumstances.

Excerpts from judgments and statutes are Crown copyright. Any Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of OPSI and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland under the Open Government Licence.