Ireland cut the awards. The cost of a claim barely moved.

The Central Bank of Ireland published its private motor report on 20 October, and one number in its Behind the Data analysis is hard to look past.

For smaller claims, under €100,000 and settled in 2025, average legal costs were “€20,000 in the litigated channel versus €2,300 in the direct channel and only €800 in the IRB.” That’s the Injuries Resolution Board, for anyone outside the Irish market.

Same €100,000 cap, three different routes. A 25-fold difference in the average legal bill.

The reform that barely moved the total

Ireland did the hard thing. The Personal Injuries Guidelines redefined the compensation awarded for different types of injury, with a general shift toward lower awards. Seána Cunningham, the Central Bank’s Director of Insurance, said the data “continues to reflect the positive impact of the personal injury guidelines”.

Yet the average cost of settling an injury claim was €39,000 between 2018 and 2021 and €38,000 between 2022 and 2025. In the Central Bank’s words, “only a 3% reduction (compared to an 11% reduction in compensation awards)”.

The Bank is candid about part of the reason. Legal costs “are not impacted by the Personal Injuries Guidelines reforms”, they’ve risen 20% in the last five years, and in 2025 they added an average of €12,000 to each injury claim settled. In its own words: “This erodes some of the reduction in claim costs achieved by the Personal Injury Guidelines.”

And litigation isn’t going away. The analysis says “circa 35% of injury claims” have settled that way every year since 2017, and the Central Bank says the bulk of claims costs are still being settled through the litigated channel for injury claims.

A bill for what nobody knew

What the report can’t tell you is why so many claims end up in court in the first place. Our view is that some of that litigated €20,000 is the price of facts nobody fixed at the start.

Take a low-speed shunt on a Tuesday. This one is invented, but you’ll recognise it. By Friday the notification is in, but nobody has a clear record of what each driver did, where the cars finished, who saw what or what the injury looked like on day one. It’s just thin. Everyone has a version and nobody has a record.

Months later, that thinness has to be argued over. Each side fills the gap with its best reading, and gaps get expensive to fill. Questions that a photograph, a timestamp or a first statement could have settled while memories were fresh now need correspondence, experts and, eventually, a hearing.

Uncertainty left alone doesn’t stay small. It compounds, and somebody pays for it.

That’s a view shaped on the defence side of the table, where cases so often turn on evidence that arrived late, or didn’t arrive at all.

Fair points

Some litigation is necessary, and a claimant who’s been seriously hurt deserves proper representation. Either side can turn down an IRB assessment, insurers included, so not every trip to court starts with the claimant. The claims that litigate may well be the harder ones, too. And better early evidence won’t settle quantum or causation: two people can read the same scan and disagree.

None of this is about solicitors padding bills or claimants gaming the system. The question is what the process hands everyone to start with.

From month six to day three

If one thing could move from month six to day three, it should be the facts.

Not the whole file, and not a bigger form for people to fill in. Just the facts that are cheap to pin down on day three and expensive to argue about in month six: what happened, where, when, who was involved, what was visible. The Central Bank itself says legal costs “can often be reduced or avoided altogether”. Day three is a good place to start.

Our founder spent 25 years as a defendant insurance solicitor, and he watched good claims struggle because the first record was too thin.

The Guidelines changed what a claim is worth. The next job is changing how soon a claim is understood.