Legal expenses provider DAS has revamped its after-the-event (ATE) rating structure in the wake of a local ruling in South Wales that supports the principle of staged premiums.
DAS has decided to rate public liability cases separately and is therefore able to offer lower premiums for other ATE customers.
As part of the revised structure, defendants who admit liability and settle early will pay the lowest ATE premiums in most cases. But if the cases are disputed and reach trial, they will pay more.
DAS operations manager Phil Bellamy said: "The exhaustive arguments we made on the need for premiums that reflect the underwriting risk rather than the amount claimed, and that we proved in the Rogers case, are the prelude to our new rates. We are confident 80e staged premiums are fully recoverable and have therefore set the rate to reflect the risk at every stage of the legal process. In the majority of cases that we hope to undertake, our premiums are market leaders.
"Early admission of liability will keep defendant insurers' costs to a minimum, which will prove popular in the current ‘claims process' environment, but the corollary of this is, of course, that disputed cases and those reaching trial now have premiums that more accurately correspond with our claims experience since we entered the market some five years ago".
