UPDATE:

After posting my thoughts below on cold callers and the personal injury industry I’ve just been reading this article from the Telegraph posted yesterday. Fascinating.

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Hey guys, it’s been just over a week since my first post and so I thought it was time to add another. The weather has been balmy lately (as Brits would say) so Sal and I have been taking advantage and went to the Lake District for a long weekend.

Anyhoo I’m finding it difficult to sleep tonight, it’s so hot, so I thought I’d spend a while writing about one of my pet hates, and that is cold callers. However, this is more about how cold callers give us personal injury lawyers and law firms in general a bad rep.

First off, I think it is important to understand that not all cold calls are a scam. However annoying they might be, companies can legitimately make cold calls as long as they abide by the laws that are in place. You can read more on that here.

Cold callers and personal injury claims

Cold callers (often known as Ambulance chasers) who call people in an attempt to get them to file a personal injury claim cause people to not trust reputable injury lawyers.

Cold callers are annoying to the majority of people, and most people feel that they are not on the up and up because the majority of the time the caller identification on the phone displays “number withheld” instead of a name and number. Most people feel that if a company were legitimate they would not mind you knowing who was calling you, and in fact recent changes in the law states that numbers now must not be withheld otherwise the company involved could face heavy fines.

Ex Culture Secretary Maria Miller announced a couple of years or so ago that the legal threshold that distinguishes what is a nuisance call should be lowered so that cold callers could be investigated more easily. I agree that these calls are annoying and can be distressing for folks receiving them. In fact more than ninety percent of people do not respond favourably to them at all.

The point that I dislike personally is that more than 42% of cold calls were regarding personal injury claims according to the Citizens Advice. You can read more here on their website, and it is a rather insightful article.

The consequences for all of the cold calls coming from people fishing for leads is it understandably causes us to distrust reputable law firms and lawyers or solicitors who are in business to assist people who were genuinely injured in some type of accident and have the legal right to file a personal injury claim.

When you create a lack of trust for any industry you can effectively damage the function of that industry and leave innocent people hurting.

Cold callers using fake names

Many cold callers give people they call fake names in an attempt to gain trust and gain access to personal information. When I say fake names it could be a name of a legit company that is easily recognizable, or one that is easy to find if you just search the name on Google. They do this because it gives the receiver of the cold call some assurance that the call is genuine, straight off the bat. Should the receiver of the call be frustrated and hang up the call almost immediately as most people do they may also instinctively blame the company name the caller gave so the caller gets away clean. Those type of calls are nothing more than a scam artist at work, period.

Cold Callers and their victims

Most people do not want to have these cold callers harassing them day and night. Most people get frustrated by the calls and they hang up on them anyway. The people that do not get frustrated and hang up on cold callers are usually elderly people who are seen to be easily taken in by scams, and crooks, because in their day a company did not work the way these cold callers do. It’s sad to say but it’s the elderly who fall prey to the majority of cold calling scams.

G Macs final thought

As I stated from the get go, not all cold calls are scams. However, for the vast majority of people they are extremely annoying. Whether a cold call about a “supposed ” accident claim is legit or not, it damages the image of the personal injury industry, and that’s not good at all.

Thanks,

G Mac.

PS. Enjoy the weather however long it lasts!