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You can't work in the no win, no fee world and not know that some of the media has a vendetta against the personal injury solicitors that make up the front line of our industry. Actually, it would be difficult to be unaware of it for anyone in the UK, I'd guess. Who doesn't know the joke about lawyers up to their necks in custard?
But some journalists take it further than others. In an entirely unrelated bit of reading, I found the financial journalist Julian Knight, while writing about doorstep lenders, making a passing reference to the upstanding personal injury lawyers who help people make compensation claims when they have suffered as a result of medical negligence... oh, all right, he called them "ambulance chasers".
Now, that might be unfair to most of the profession, but it's quite common; we've got a tough skin about that. But he went on to say that he would consign such lawyers to the "icy ninth circle of Hell". I'm always pleased to see a bit of literary reference in a paper, such as the Dante here, but he's ranking the activity of making a compensation claim as being more deserving of punishment than, say, murder here. Surely some exaggeration?
Incidentally, if I'm right to find an element of anger, or 'wrath', in that exaggeration, that would be a sin that qualifies its sinner for a place in the fifth circle - let's hope I'm wrong.
I may not be the only one. Knight writes that "Dante, more lenient than I, consigned them to the seventh, sitting in a desert of flaming sand." It''s not entirely clear from that 'them' whether he means to include the no win, no fee lawyers or just the lenders, but it only works if it's the latter.
A facetious proof can be found in the fact that conditional fee arrangements were not common in late medieval Italy, but - more importantly - there are no lawyers in the inner ring of the seventh circle (that desert he's talking about). There are usurers there - that's probably the money lenders he's referring to.
It may be making a mountain out of a molehill to focus on this throwaway comment so much, but these references to the classics do tend to give weight to an argument, so it is worth unpicking them where they are unfair. I can't recall a Dantean circle having a space for being a lawyer, whether a no win, no fee one or not; it is unfair to attempt to include them with a rhetorical gesture.
So, perhaps a little forgiveness is due to the personal injury professionals I work for as they endeavour to see that justice is done for those who suffer a work injury or a whiplash diagnosis? Dante's poem is, after all, the Divine Comedy.
