England and Wales now have contigency fees for injury litigation, as well as allowing solicitors to advertise. This, in my experience, has increased the number of claims, particularly in motor cases. However, there are rules on the amount that can be claimed in legal fees, although these rules do encourage solicitors to try and inflate the value of any given claim, in order to increase their fees.

Quite often it is cheaper for an insurance company to pay off a claimant, even if they suspect that the claim may be false to some degree, because of the cost of defence. It is not unknown for a case to be taken into court with what is thought to be a water tight defence only to have the claim agreed for the plaintiff on what appear to be very spurious grounds - this happened to me when I was handling these sort of claims. It really sticks in the craw to pay out on that type of claim but the economics of the court system make it inevitable that it happens.