We get a lot of frustrated callers, who call in as a result of our advertising, and who want to know about doing a Road Accident Fund claim. There are many people who we cannot help, not because they don’t have a claim but because they don’t have a claim that we think they will ultimately be happy to do.

In other words, they may have a claim for R200,00 worth of past medical expenses which money will have to refunded to their medical aid or they may have a claim for an undertaking to cover their future treatment, something that I think is extremely valuable but that most people with a medical aid who will pick up the tab don’t seem to consider that important. If we turn away the case, the member of the public is very distressed saying that we are only interested in helping people with bigger claims, and on the other hand, if we take on the business, we know all to well how at the end of the matter, the clients will then complain saying that we put them through this long and arduous process, had them fill in tons of forms, sign documents, attend medico legal appointments (for hours at times) and to quote them, “All I am getting is a certificate of undertaking.”

At that time, no matter how much you explain how valuable the undertaking is, in terms of letting them get treatment, they are not interested. At the end of the day, we will be paid, and one simply does not feel comfortable getting paid when your client gets something that they don’t think is valuable. You also then become entangled with a client who does not recall that they were told that the claim would hardly be worth anything even though we send registered post letters to that effect to clients in such instances when they insist we take on the case, and who want to complain about it. The problem is that the law changed on 1 August 2008 and many people, while seeing great results and hearing about other people’s cases, do not understand that many of those results may relate to the law as it was previously or alternatively, they simply don’t judge very well the severity of somebody else’s injuries compared to theirs. Either way, we get a lot of people who are very unhappy because we cannot take them on as clients, and there is nothing we can do about it, because at the end of the day, if the law means that they no longer have a case which is worthwhile for them to do or perhaps no case at all, we cannot assist them.