What next for the personal injury market?

After a long period of legislative reforms and almost constant changes, it’s beginning to feel like the personal injury market could be entering a steadier phase, and it genuinely does feel different.

Of course, there are still pressures and complexity, but with hopefully fewer disruptive changes landing, it feels like there is space to think more proactively about creating outcomes that matter for injured people.

In my article, I explore a few driving forces that I believe will shape the next phase of the personal injury market. These aren’t meant to be exhaustive but they’re the things I find myself returning to in conversation.

I would welcome your reflections and perspectives as the conversation continues.

Greater scope for constructive collaboration

After years dominated by structural change, the pace of wholesale reform seems to have eased, even as debate and adjustment continue at the margins. With fewer disruptive changes, the sector can grasp the greater capacity it creates to focus on how it fulfils its role — delivering fair outcomes, maintaining public confidence and operating in a way that is economically sustainable for all participants.

Achieving that stability really matters, as it allows the wider personal injury ecosystem to get back to prioritising consistency, judgement and the quality of outcomes delivered across the life of a claim, while also creating greater scope for constructive collaboration across the sector.

This steadier environment creates the conditions for better decisions to be made earlier, for participants to work together with greater clarity of intent and for the customer experience to be shaped in a more joined-up and purposeful way. In that context, the opportunity is collective: to deliver fairer outcomes for injured people while strengthening confidence in how the sector operates and the value it creates.

Mediation as a Natural Evolution
As one of the early advocates and protagonists of ADR, we see first hand its expanding role in shaping how personal injury disputes are be resolved. Courts remain central to the sector but realistically can no longer be viewed as the inevitable destination for every disputed claim. Mediation, earlier dialogue and more focused negotiation are creating opportunities to bring clarity sooner, reduce friction and progress cases with greater intent.

Even when used effectively, ADR does not replace legal rigour or remove the ability to challenge where it matters, but it does provide a structured route to narrow issues, test positions and resolve suitable cases more efficiently. In doing so, it can support proportionality while also preserving fairness.

When applied well, the benefits are shared across the ecosystem. Mediation supports earlier clarity for customers, greater certainty for those bearing liability, a more proportionate use of legal expertise at scale and it helps relieve the well-documented pressure on the courts. In that sense, it represents a genuine win for all involved.

Next Generation Talent & Capability
As the pace of change continues to accelerate, within personal injury and across business more generally, the sector will need to draw on a broader range of skills than traditional legal pathways alone have typically provided.

Technical legal expertise will remain fundamental, but it will increasingly need to sit within a broader capability set. Data, technology, artificial intelligence, change leadership and service design are no longer simply support functions; they are becoming core components of how effective personal injury organisations are built and led. The ability to combine legal judgement with operational fluency and technological understanding is becoming a defining characteristic.

There’s an increasing need for the sector to challenge its own assumptions about what a career in personal injury looks like and who it is for. Attracting future talent will increasingly depend on drawing expertise from beyond traditional legal pathways and bringing different perspectives into the business. At the same time, the sector needs to take greater ownership of how it presents itself as a destination for both legal and non-legal talent, to promote itself as a place where purposeful careers can be built and a diversity of skills and expertise are actively valued.

The Evolving RTA Landscape
The direction and pace of travel, in regard to new modes of transport, advances in vehicle technology, changing insurance structures and continued improvements in road safety, points to a evolving RTA PI sector.

While many of these developments remain modest in scale today, their combined impact points to a market that will increasingly favour firms with deep-rooted RTA expertise and the confidence to apply established principles across a far broader and more complex range of claim scenarios.

What this also reinforces is the need for continuous adaptability. As the nature of RTA claims evolves, legal providers will need to think and operate with flexibility and foresight, applying experience to new contexts and innovating in how claims are progressed.

The fundamentals remain constant: injured people must be able to access appropriate support and outcomes must remain fair and workable. But achieving that will increasingly depend on the sector’s ability to anticipate change rather than simply react to it.

Technology as a Strategic Capability
As is no doubt the case with many other industries, technology is going to be one of the most influential forces shaping the future of personal injury, but its impact will be defined more by how it is applied rather than how advanced it appears.

In the near term, progress won’t come from much-hyped autonomous, agentic AI, but more from disciplined automation that supports, rather than replaces, professional judgement and expertise.

AI  is likely to prove most valuable when embedded within defined workflows – supporting triage, analysis, pattern recognition and information handling,  while decisions remain anchored in human expertise. The complexity, risk and ethical responsibility inherent in personal injury mean that unchecked autonomy is neither realistic nor desirable. Combining automation with oversight, accountability and experience and what is really going to matter.

What this also does is place knowledge right at the centre of the equation. AI will not succeed on general-purpose models alone, but on the quality of the context it can draw on – case history, documentation, legal interpretation, behavioural insight and institutional memory. I can see ‘knowledge management’ becoming a major strategic capability, enabling technology to augment expertise safely and reliably. In this environment, I genuinely believe that technology will only strengthen the role of legal professionals, rather than diminishing it.

These are just my reflections on where I think the market is heading and I’m sure others will see it differently, which is part of what makes these conversations worth having.

I’m excited for the opportunity to shift our collective attention back to where it belongs: the injured people we’re all here to serve.