Reply to post: Re: I feel dirty saying this

Re: I feel dirty saying this

[quote]Yes, "guns for hire" companies often look shady and mercenary but if they are the tools available then that's what you use.[/quote]

Well I tried to agree with you, I really did, but it still felt too dirty so I couldn't. You see I have some experience of these litigation companies. One of them in particular.

I come from what was in my childhood a small mining village in Derbyshire. My grandfather had to retire from the mines early because he got a disease called pneumoconiosis, common among miners, and in 1962 he died of it, aged 63. That was three days before my ninth birthday and I can still remember the home nurse standing in the kitchen and telling us he'd died. It was the first time I'd known aybody who died.

The government created a fund to compensate miners and their families who had suffered from such causes, and my family was approached by a firm which said it would pursue a claim from the fund on her behalf. To protect the innocent I'll call the firm Irwin Mitchell of Sheffield.

Just fill in a simple form and we'll do the rest.

Well "the rest" turned out to be booking as much time as possible to the case file so that they could claim the maximum cash from the government fund FOR THEMSELVES, and as far as I can tell the miners could go fuck themselves. The firm repeatedly ignored contact from the family, except, in answer to every inquiry, for sending ANOTHER copy of the SAME form asking for it to be filled in.

By the time I was 30. although I did not know it, they were apparently still asking for the form to be completed and my grandmother would be reduced to tears if my mother just mentioned the form. Later I remembered other retired miners in the village saying things like "I can't be bothered with it". We were all poor - according to some league table or other we were the third poorest village in the country - and at the time I didn't understand why they wouldn't bother claiming money that had been put there especially for them.

By the time I was 40 my grandmother had died, my mother had taken over the form-filling and Irwin Mitchell were still asking for the form to be completed. I still did not know what they were doing.

Not long before my mother died the correspondence passed to me. So I discovered what had been going on, and terminated it in writing. A partner from the firm then had the cheek to try to call me, to persuade me to keep them on. I refused to speak to him and said that from now on everything between Irwin Mitchell and my family would have to be in writing only. I still have all the correspondence, and the forms, in my filing cabinet. The family never received a penny from the fund that was supposed to be for their benefit.

I still loathe these ambulance-chasing lawyers with an almost deranged passion. All they ever did for the women in my family was add more misery to the already almost unbearable burden of the untimely loss of a husband and father. Writing this brings back awful memories and almost chokes me but I want *everybody* to know what these parasites will do to people to make their profits.