4.1 Inference 131
quite trivial car accidents. The writer Andrew
Malleson wrote a book called Whiplash and
Other Useful Illnesses. The content is serious,
but the book’s tongue-in-cheek title tells its
own story.
Here is another document, this time
graphical. It consists of three bar charts. (See
Chapters 3.7 and 5.4 for further questions of this
type.) The data is from an official questionnaire
conducted among 509 randomly selected adults
living in the UK. However, it probably reflects
opinion in many developed countries.DOC 3CHART 1671520A lot more people
receiving paymentsA few more people
Virtually no change
Fewer people%Compared with ve years ago, do you think there
has been a change in the number of people receiving
compensation payments for personal injuries?* Respondents who answered ‘Don’t know’ have been
excluded from chart.CHART 2285029A lot more people
making false claimsA few more peopleVirtually no change
Fewer people%Compared with ve years ago, do you think there has
been a change in the number of people making false claims?* Respondents who answered ‘Don’t know’ have been
excluded from chart.that a lawyer’s cases all have the same value,
and require the same level of input in terms of
hours worked, and other costs. Arguably a
lawyer could lose a small number of very
complex cases and still be out of pocket
because they were worth more in fees than the
income generated from cases he or she won.
Strictly speaking E is safe to infer only if on
average all cases cost about the same to pursue.
And so we come to F: ‘Claims being pursued
for personal injury have increased significantly
since the introduction of conditional-fee
agreements.’ By now it should be clear that this
cannot be inferred from Doc 2 either. You may
have thought that F could be inferred because it
seems so likely to be true, given that conditional-
fee agreements allow people to make claims
without having to pay anything. In that respect
F is like B. But F can only be inferred if it is also
assumed that there have been no other changes
which might have had a reverse effect. Nor can F
be inferred without assuming that lawyers now
take on more cases than they did before the
introduction of no-win no-fee. Doc 2 provides
no information to justify either of these
assumptions. In fact, the note about E in the
previous paragraph suggests that lawyers may be
much more selective than they were, since they
have more to lose. F could, quite realistically, be
false, and public opinion seriously flawed.
The clear warning to take from the
discussion above is that many seemingly
reasonable inferences were in fact unsafe. Some
of the claims may be true, and may be found to
be so after further investigation. But Doc 2, as it
stands, lacks the hard data we would need for
drawing conclusions such as B, C or F.
Popular opinion
Many people hold the opinion that there is a
growing ‘compensation culture’, with many
more claims being made for injuries – real or
otherwise – than there were, say, five or ten
years ago. Many also take the view that a lot of
the claims are bogus, or fraudulent, especially
the infamous ‘whiplash’ injury, following