Hussain: A lot of personal injury firms “don’t have a clue”
An entrepreneur has revealed plans to combine a claims management company, a consumer website and the clinical negligence department of a top 100 firm to form a market-dominating alternative business structure (ABS).
Sajid Hussain, managing director of legal process outsourcer the Outspire Group, said he had secured £8-£12m of funding over five years for the ABS and now just needed lawyers.
“I want to dominate the market,” he told Legal Futures. “I want to hire the best lawyers in the country, I want them to run the best cases and I want to be first for clinical negligence.
“We are dead serious about this. The market is becoming saturated with personal injury firms, but a lot of them don’t have a clue what they’re doing. Plenty of professional negligence cases will be coming out of this arena very soon.
“The playground has changed. Clinical negligence cases are taking longer to settle. The NHSLA is not paying on time, freezing the cash-flow of law firms, the Jackson reforms are kicking in and smaller firms want to settle claims and get out of the market.”
Mr Hussain said he had secured the cash from two main funders he did not want to identify to invest in the ABS.
He said he was currently negotiating with a top 100 law firm, which would transfer its clinical negligence department into the ABS, along with 5R1, the claims management company he founded, and www.mistreatment.com, a customer-facing website which is a trading name of Outspire.
5R1 offers a range of service,s from handling initial enquiries and case vetting, to taking statements from claimants and preparing reports covering the circumstances of claims.
Mr Hussain said that if the talks with the law firm did not produce results, other arrangements with law firms would be explored, with the aim of securing a deal at the latest within three to four months.
“If you’ve got the money, you’ve got to put it into a vehicle,” he said. “Whoever’s got the cash is in the driving seat. Everything is in place, the business plan is done and now all we need is the specialist lawyers.
“If one firm is big enough to handle the amount we generate, we can do a deal with them. If not, we will go to multiple firms. Our problem is that we’ve got too much work and we need to find a home for it”.
Mr Hussain said he was confident that the ABS would aim to generate £125 to £225m in revenue over five years.
“This will be a good thing for the clinical negligence industry,” he added. “The aim is to reduce the cost of running cases without losing the specialist approach of lawyers.”
