Woolham: Business model can support sustainable growth
Leading personal injury (PI) law firm Minster Law said yesterday that it has completed a three-year transformation that allows it to run low-value whiplash claims profitably.
The Yorkshire-based firm, which also has a fast-growing serious injury practice, turned a £4.7m loss in 2022/23 to a pre-tax profit of £503,000 in 2023/24. Turnover jumped 15% to nearly £37m.
Minster Law, which is owned by insurance business BHL, is not a direct-to-consumer operation, focusing instead on providing claimant services to insurers.
Other sources of work include the deal it struck with Irwin Mitchell in 2021, after acquiring the national firm’s fast-track book, which refers PI work that it does not want to handle.
The whiplash reforms introduced in May 2021 have upended the PI market by stamping down on margins for road traffic claims worth up to £5,000, once the bread and butter of many PI firms, while also throttling claim numbers.
Minster chief executive Shirley Woolham said that “doing volume PI the same as it used to be done was just not an option, with income per case dropping through the floor”.
She went on: “We realised early that to focus only on the pursuit of volume was not a strategy capable of creating a profitable business…
“Over the last three years we have had to radically review our cost to income ratio, re-engineered our processes, changed our internal structures, introduced new skills, capabilities and technology and re-think how we create value – for our clients and our shareholders.
“In doing so, we’ve created a model capable of supporting sustainable growth and the result is a £5m swing into profit during the past 12 months, and the delivery of £2.5m EBITDA for 23/24 excluding exceptionals in a very tough market.”
Ms Woolham told Legal Futures that Minster was making a profit from whiplash cases that go through the Official Injury Claim portal – and that it was not really possible without scale.
But she continued: “Scale is important but that doesn’t mean the answer is being a volume claims factory. You’ve got to focus on making sure the customer outcomes are right.”
Balancing efficiencies with customer outcomes – especially as Minster was effectively an extension of insurers’ brands – was “probably why it’s taken us three years to build a model”.
Ms Woolham said RTA serious injury cases were up by almost 50% in two years, with 188 staff out of a total of 508 across the business now working in the field.
With “new partnerships in serious injury” set to be announced soon, the firm is now “actively pursuing further expansion” of the division, both organically and through acquisition.
Ms Woolham said acquisitions would not be about buying cases; rather, the focus was on strategic moves that would allow Minster to access markets it was not currently in.
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