Reform of the legal process to help cut insurance costs is unlikely to reduce the amount of court time involved in personal injury lawsuits, an Oireachtas committee heard yesterday.
The new Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB) will not be allowed to hear complex cases.
Therefore, it will inevitably be limited to processing relatively straightforward disputes that would previously have been settled out of court, a courts service delegation told the joint committee on enterprise and small business.
"The establishment of the Personal Injuries Assessment Board is not likely to materially alter the amount of court time allocated to personal injury actions in the short term," said Mr PJ Fitzpatrick, chief executive of the Courts Service.
"The PIAB... is designed to deal with cases where liability is not at issue and the role of the board is to assess the level of damage... It is therefore clear that the type of cases to be dealt with are those which generally do not go to full hearing."
The PIAB, a key component of reforms in the insurance market promised by the Tánaiste, Ms Harney, will first be used to deal with claims against employers' liability insurance for accidents at work.
The Government plans to extend it later to motor accident claims.
The board is expected to operate a "book" of awards, on a scale set by comparison with previous such awards given by Irish courts.
Therefore, the board will have firm guidelines as to the amount of compensation to be awarded depending on the severity of the injury involved.
Although personal injury cases would continue to occupy the courts, the advent of the PIAB would see a reduction in red tape as the number of summonses issued was likely to fall significantly, said Mr Fitzpatrick.
He said: "If successful, it will undoubtedly reduce significantly the work of the offices in issuing thousands of summonses each year and the subsequent work in processing these cases to the stage where they are ready for hearing."
Business groups and the insurance industry have lobbied strongly for the establishment of the PIAB.
However, the legal profession has raised misgivings, claiming that if accident victims go before the board without significant legal representation, as is proposed, they will be at a disadvantage.
Fianna Fáil's Mr Tony Dempsey asked why judges did not receive formal training. Family and personal injury laws had undergone huge shifts in the past 20 years without any change in the system of selecting or educating the judiciary, he said.
