Internet Newsletter for Lawyers
July/August 2005, by Delia Venables

The Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) site is at www.apil.com. This is worth the membership fee alone. The web site is a treasure trove of information ranging from briefing notes to old copies of the bi monthly magazine PI focus. It contains a page with links to a significant number of other sites which can assist the PI lawyer. For me however, the web forum over which Helen Blundell, APIL’s Head of Legal Affairs, presides is the jewel in the crown. Here members can post messages, ask for assistance and share thoughts with other members on line. If you save the links you will invariably find that you can rapidly build a picture of what is going on and keep a very valuable resource of information for future reference. As one contributor member Mr Richard Penn, said, “I would just like to say how helpful and informative I find the forum. Quite apart from the numerous suggestions for solving legal and procedural dilemmas, it is reassuring to know that we are not alone in our struggles”.

Often some of the country’s leading lawyers can be found posting answers to your question. Do not worry if it appears that someone has not got a reply address; you can always click on the person’s name and send a private message.

The next site to bookmark is www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk. This site is for me the best free site of day to day practical application for a typical PI lawyer. The site provides access to numerous court service guides, cases of significance and contact details for all courts. The best for my money is the online forms section. All Court forms for the County Court can be found here and can be downloaded. If you have the right software it is a simple task to save the forms and fill them in and then save this completed for use in a precedent bank. The beauty of this is that the forms are always bang up to date and free. So if you’re paying for forms on a disk, at the next renewal time, look at this site!

Now you know how it is, someone’s pinched your white book and you need to look at a certain rule. Well the Department of Constitutional Affairs, at www.dca.gov.uk, provides the rules on line as well as a lot of other interesting information (do you know how much judges earn?).

I quite often have to deal with disputes about traffic lights and roundabouts. The Government has put the Highway Code on line at www.highwaycode.gov.uk. There you can download all the information and cut and paste it into your letters to explain to those jolly nice people in the insurance claims department why your client is in the right and their insured isn’t and they ought to send the cheque pronto!

Now especially if you work for clients who may be remote from your office and who have had a “prang” in another county it may be the case you need to establish contact with the Police, Hospital, Ambulance or Coroner service. www.police.uk and www.nhs.uk provide links to all relevant forces, hospitals and trusts. For local authorities, www.direct.gov.uk will enable you to quickly identify which authority would have responsibility for a stretch of road and much else besides.

For those wise lawyers who prefer not to get entangled in MIB work, the MIDIS site is a potential goldmine. On first telephone contact, armed with the registration number of the car concerned, it is possible at www.midis.org.uk to check if there is in force a certificate of insurance. If it is, they will email you the insurance information and if not, you can access all the MIB information at www.mib.org.uk. This site not only has the rules of the schemes but downloadable forms which again can minimize your paper stock and ensure your using the correct form for the case in issue.

If you are concerned with employers liability claims, you will find www.companieshouse.gov.uk to be a superb resource which enables you to check the registered office of a firm and its trading status and allows you to order company information. The equivalent for sole traders can be found at www.insolvency.gov.uk. I remember well coming home from an undefended case for a firm and typing in the name of the defendant to see the firm had spent literally years pursuing a bankrupt! They will not make that mistake again.

The HSE is now putting much more information into the public domain and www.hse-databases.co.uk will give you access to a public register of convictions. This can be helpful if your client thinks HSE was involved and was convicted or is not certain. It can help you to get an idea if the defendant firm is a persistent offender.

The government’s site www.direct.gov.uk is very useful. The site gives access to all state benefits available and the corresponding eligibility criteria. This site also enables you to download forms for completion. At the time of writing this article the industrial benefits link is down. But having saved this document from the site, it is a painless exercise to send to the client on new instruction an application pack as a value added extra to the service. Many of our clients have appreciated the assistance.

To see how members of the public can dispense with the need for a solicitor all together, you may want to look at the site www.cica.gov.uk. This provides a resource to enable online submission of criminal compensation claims and ready access to forms for downloading and completion and all the rules for the scheme. I found it invaluable at my last practice especially when dealing with cases where the client was more than capable of submitting an application and was unwilling to pay for me to do so.

Finally, www.hcwtoolbox.co.uk is worth a visit if you want an interest or Ogden calculator for working on special damages calculations. Again, it is free. I have recently downloaded this myself and I wish I had done so long ago.

Lee McIlwaine is Principal Solicitor of Lee Solicitors and a fellow of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL). He has over 20 years experience of both sides of Personal Injury work. He has contributed to the National Occupational Standards for Legal advice initiative, the Journal of Personal Injury Law and Legal Technology insider (LTi) and is a regular contributor to the APIL web forum.

Email lee@injurysolicitors.co.uk.

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