Posted by Simon Bradshaw [1], head of personal injury at Legal Futures Associate Verisk [2]
Bradshaw: Guardrails are critical
Automation products are now commonplace within the legal sector, with most firms relying on technology to process information, manage caseload volume and allocate expertise.
As these tools become more sophisticated, they are increasingly used for more complex tasks, such as interpreting evidence and informing case strategy.
This shift is particularly evident in the personal injury sector, where automated assessment of medical reports assists lawyers in managing high case volumes with software ‘reading’ these reports. However, the reliability of these systems depends on their ability to adapt to several evasive factors that have already begun to shift.
Whiplash Injury Regulations 2021
The radical whiplash reforms, introduced by the Civil Liability Act 2018, implemented a statutory tariff structure for personal injury claims, scaling fixed-sum payments by duration of the claimant’s injury.
Its broad aim was to economise the claims process for all parties: streamlining it for claimants, reducing costs for insurers, and lowering premiums for policyholders. Notably, the reforms removed the recoverability of legal costs and enabled claimants to submit and manage their own claims without legal representation.
By narrowing the scope of compensation to focus on the injury type and recovery period, the tariff shifts the evidential weight onto the claimant’s mandatory medical evidence. Automating this process relies on the assumption that there will be little change in the format of medical reports, types of losses, and the injuries and their severity.
If any of these factors shift, the automation process will need to adjust accordingly to avoid drawing lawyers back into cases where evidential inconsistencies trigger the need for manual review.
Automation insights into personal injury evidence
Over 60,000 medical reports were automatically assessed in 2025. The process relies on guardrails defining boundaries to detect cases that require expert intervention.
These critical guardrails are instructed by a database of two million personal injury claims, informing which injuries can be expected in varying road incidents and providing a benchmark for validating medical report contents.
Nearly half (49%) of non-tariff injuries reported at notification are not included in the claimant’s medical report. Meanwhile, 33% of non-tariff injuries that are notified in medical reports weren’t previously included at notification.
These discrepancies highlight the risk of increasingly undervalued claims, undercompensating claimants and creating procedural complexities for legal representatives.
Late-emerging non-tariff injuries also pose credibility challenges to claimants. Insurers may question the reliability of evidence, increasing chances of disputes. It must be determined which cases involved a genuine mistake, misunderstanding and a legitimate delay in reporting injuries.
Changes in injury and accident characteristics
Since the tightened regulations and statutory definition of whiplash were introduced in section 1 of the 2018 Act, road incidents and injury patterns have begun to change.
While hit and rear collisions remain the most common form of accident, the proportion of injuries arising from these incidents has fallen 10% as car safety improves. Meanwhile, collisions involving lane-changing are rising, highlighting contrasting trends to lower UK speed limits and increasing driving assistance technology.
These trends make it difficult to predict which injury-incident combinations will arise in the future, emphasising the importance of interrogating which medical reports can be automated and which require examination.
As the industry moves towards a landscape where the majority of personal injury claims involve a degree of automation, it is important to determine which claims are suited for automated assessment.
As the composition of claims evolve, so must the guardrails and the technology that enable automation to ensure accuracy and defensibility.
For more information, please contact Simon at claimsuk@verisk.com [3]