Solicitors' fees account for less than half of total legal costs in personal injuries cases, according to the director general of the Law Society, Mr Ken Murphy.
Mr Murphy was responding to a report in yesterday's Irish Times that lawyers' fees in such cases amounted to €440 million last year. The figure was in a submission from the Irish Insurance Federation to the Tánaiste on insurance costs. He also said the society would not accept any figures from the federation without checking the data on which it was based.
Even accepting the figure the federation gave, Mr Murphy said that there was a distinction between legal costs and legal fees.
Legal costs included court fees, the cost of experts on both sides in a case and VAT at 21 per cent, as well as the cost of briefing a barrister. This meant that solicitors' fees could be less than half of all the legal costs of a case, he said. "Some of the experts at times earn more than the lawyers," he added.
He also said figures which purport to show unfair comparisons between Ireland and the UK were misleading. "In the UK the ratio of litigation costs to the amounts paid to claimants is 107 per cent," he added. He said the Motor Insurance Advisory Board report showed that the total profits of motor insurance in Ireland between 1993 and 1999 were £343 million. In the UK, they were £30 million sterling.
Given that the numbers insured in the UK were at least ten times more than the number insured in Ireland, this meant that motor insurance was about 100 times more profitable here, he claimed.
The director of the Bar Council, Mr Jerry Carroll, said the council could not respond until it had received a breakdown of the federation's figures.