The Court of Appeal has left much hanging in the air following delivery of the much-anticipated judgement in the mixed tariff and non-tariff injury test cases of Rabot & Briggs.
The majority judgement provides direction that courts should:
1. assess the tariff amount
2. assess the non-tariff injury separately and
3. without reference to the whiplash injury, then add the sums together but “step back” to apply an adjustment to avoid over-compensation.
There remains much uncertainty over the detail of how practitioners should approach this in detailed terms, and with a powerful dissenting judgement from the Master of the Rolls it seems certain that further court time will be required to provide the injury claims community with the clarity required.
The challenge presented by this uncertain situation comes more sharply into focus when viewed in the light of recent data from the IOC Portal. It shows that more than two thirds of all claims notified involve mixed injury types, and the majority of these claims have whiplash, psychological and physical injury.
Furthermore, under 9% of claims are Litigants in Person( LiP), where 74% are represented by law firms, 26% by alternative business structures (ABS) and only 0.3% by claims management companies.
Wherever the next development in this complex situation takes us, it’s clear that compensators will need the ability to identify mixed injury cases to track their development and understand in real-time the approaches being taken by those who represent claimants.
With that in mind, 360Globalnet can provide invaluable insights into injury claim portfolios and how they can develop in response to changes of this type.
Our technology, 360Retrieve, can ingest all unstructured data; claims forms, OICP documents, MOJ documents, emails, letters, image metadata, expert reports, and much more – and turn 100% of that data searchable and capable of analysis. Attributes present within individual claims - such as injury types - are rendered searchable and reportable to provide a powerful insight to the ways in which the portfolio might be affected by a changing legal environment. By way of example, if damages recoverable for a specific injury type or medical condition were to be materially changed by developing case law, 360Retrieve can undertake a real-time search of all data to identify any claim where reference to that injury or condition appears.
Using the same methodology and customer-specified search criteria, 360Retrieve can deliver a wide range of management insights, from case-specific fraud detection to whole-portfolio evaluation. This can then be broken down to entity level delivering ‘Know Your Opponent’ (KYO) analysis.
If you would like to discuss how 360Retrieve could deliver analytical capability across 100% of your available data, get in touch to arrange an in-person or virtual demonstration.
