Personal injury and clinical negligence
Fixed costs. Long portals. Admin nobody can recover.
Under fixed recoverable costs, every unpaid hour on a file comes straight off your margin. The work the firm can change is what happens inside it: chasing, updates, medical records, and supervision of the people running the caseload.
367 days.
The average time from submission to settlement on the Official Injury Claim portal, with about 120,000 claims sitting in "pending medical".
Where the hours go on a PI file.
Chasing medical evidence. Requests, reminders and follow-ups for records and reports, tracked in calendars and memory.
Client updates. Clients phoning to ask where their claim is, on calls nobody can charge for.
Reviewing medical records. Hundreds of pages read by hand to build a chronology.
Portal steps. Re-keying the same details into the portal, the case management system and the letters.
Schedules of loss. Built from scratch or copied from an old file.
Supervision. Partners checking caseloads by opening files one at a time, because the reports aren't trusted.
The systems you don't control.
The Official Injury Claim portal.
87.4% of claims are now represented, and the medical report cycle, not form filling, is what holds files up.
The whiplash tariff.
Up about 15% from 31 May 2025, with the next review in 2027.
Fixed recoverable costs.
Extended to more cases, with the review postponed. For clinical negligence claims up to £25,000, fixed costs stalled after the 2024 election with no new date, so firms are planning without knowing.
None of this is in your control. What is in your control is how much time a file takes inside your firm.
What firms like yours are doing.
Firms that are getting ahead aren't buying more software. They're taking the repeated work off fee earners, and making sure the AI their people already use is safe and checked. The realistic saving we see in the evidence is two to five hours a fee earner a week, mostly in drafting, summarising and chasing. Under fixed costs, every one of those hours is margin.
If you're 5 to 20 fee earners.
The partners are the supervisors, the IT department and the fee earners at once. Start with an AI Day, so the tools people already use are safe, then automate the chasing and client updates.
If you're 20 to 50 fee earners.
You're probably running paralegal led caseloads on a system built for the average firm, with spreadsheets alongside it. This is where a case management system built around your workflow pays back fastest, because cost per file is the only lever you have.
In progress. A firm on a slow hosted system saw its own workflow on screen within three working days of its first session with us. Scoping started the following week.
See how the build worksWhat the regulator expects.
Supervision of volume work.
The SRA's 2024 guidance on high volume consumer claims warned that systems don't replace supervision of case handlers. In July 2026, the Legal Services Board said firms with a high ratio of unqualified to qualified fee earners, particularly in personal injury, should review their models.
AI use.
The SRA issued a warning notice on misuse of AI in August 2026. Firms need to be able to show which tools are used, with what client data, and who checks the output.
Cyber.
PI and clinical negligence firms report the highest concern about cyber security of any small firm practice area.
Where to start.
Questions PI partners ask.
Can you build a case management system for a personal injury firm?
Yes. We build it around how your firm runs its files, connected to your accounts system and the portals you use. Most builds cost £30,000 to £70,000 at a fixed price and take three to four months, with a working prototype within three working days of a free half-day review.
Will a new system work with the Official Injury Claim portal?
It connects to the portals and services your files depend on, wherever they offer a way in, so details are entered once.
Can AI review medical records safely?
It can summarise and build a chronology, with a fee earner checking every output. The client data has to stay in a tool with the right terms, and the checking has to be written into the process. That's part of every system and every AI Day we run.
Is it worth it under fixed costs?
Under fixed costs, the only way to protect margin is to spend less time per file. That's the business case, and we'll work through it with your own numbers in the half-day review.
We also do clinical negligence. Does that change anything?
The files are longer and the medical evidence heavier, so the case for help with records and chronologies is stronger.
See where your firm's hours go.
A first conversation costs nothing. We'll tell you which stop makes sense for a PI firm of your size.