The Law Society has been cleared of any wrong doing by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) over its controversial “Don’t Get Mugged By An Insurer” campaign, after they discovered that it did not breach their code.
The campaign has caused uproar amongst the insurance industry this summer, with six complaints being made in total. Of the six, four argued that the advert was mis-representative of insurers and making them look like criminals who acted unfairly and beat up or bullied claimants into taking their offers.
The two other complaints were in regards to the appropriateness of the image used which it was claimed would distress actual victims of muggings.
But the ASA has thrown these arguments out and found that consumers would find the image as it was intended and that the advert did not in anyway suggest that insurers were criminals.
Both the Association of British Insurers (ABI) and the Forum of Insurance Lawyers (FIL) have condemned the use of the advert in the past few weeks, releasing statements to denounce it and claiming that the Law Society were just mud slinging in an unprofessional manner.
This forced the Society to defend the ad campaign and they have remained firm and defiant throughout, insisting that the campaign was meant to ‘eye-catching’ and ‘memorable’ in order to get their message across, whilst meeting advertising standards.
The campaign came about after the government had introduced wholesale reform to the personal injury industry, most notably cutting the amount of fixed recoverable costs a personal injury lawyer can claim and shifting the burden of paying for legal representation to the claimant instead of the defence.
Its aim was to make sure claimants realised that although they would now have to pay for their legal representation, through their own damages in the case of a successful claim, they still stood to get four times the amount they would do if they accepted an out of court, early offer from an insurance company.
Image source
1. Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Society_of_England_and_Wales#/media/File:Law_Society_of_England_and_Wales.svg
