Anyone who suffers personal injury enters an uncertain period, with concerns about work, income and recovery. Usually they will have little knowledge of the law. Most victims simply do not know how personal injury claims are handled, which costs are reasonable, or which rules a representative has to follow. This is all the more reason why victims should be able to depend on the integrity of professional representatives. Unfortunately, this is also where their vulnerability lies.
While there are many passionate and ethical representatives, there is also another reality. The reality of a world in which visibility, commerce and financial may outgrow quality. Instagram, TikTok and other channels are campaigning with promotion videos or even influencers to bring in victims. To a person unfamiliar with the personal injury practice this may very well sound convincing and reliable, but a slick profile does not guarantee a careful representation of their interests.
Gatekeeper role
This is exactly why the WODC report The representative in personal injury cases from 2024 is so important. This report identifies what can go wrong in practice: double billing, obscure remuneration structures, and killer contracts. These are practices that touch the heart of proper representation. A person who does not understand what he is signing, does not know how his representative is paid, or gets trapped in a contract he can barely get out of, will lose grip on his own case file. The WODC put its finger on the problem: this is where insurers have a gatekeeper role. Insurers are not on the sideline; they see how case files progress, which information is shared or not, how bills are composed, and whether or not a claim is handled swiftly and fairly. If this process reveals patterns of deception, careless file handling, double billing, undue delay, or personal financial gain, insurers cannot hide behind the argument that this is a matter between victim and representative only.
This opinion has now been confirmed in recent court rulings. In the Unigarant case, the Court of Appeal of Arnhem-Leeuwarden has set a framework by ruling that an insurer is only free to refuse a representative if it has good reasons to do so. This will be the case in particular if they have valid reasons to fear that the claims handling process between the insurer and the injured party will not proceed well or will be unduly delayed due to the representative, because the representative has shown that:
• it is not (or insufficiently) reliable, e.g. by providing incorrect information; and/or
• it apparently lacks the knowledge and experience necessary to give the injured party proper guidance in the claims handling process; and/or
• it charges unreasonably high extrajudicial costs.
The bar is high. Insurers cannot be guided by their intuition, but have to act on the basis of concrete indications. This is illustrated in more detail in the following two recent rulings of the Court of Midden Nederland.
The ruling of 18 March 2026 in the matter between a representative versus insurance company a.s.r. shows how serious it gets if a financial construction around representation is obscure. In this ruling, the Court described how different versions were told to the client and the insurer. There were two versions of the contract for services – one with a success fee and one without it – and a.s.r. was only given the version without the success fee. The client was not aware at all of the extrajudicial costs that a.s.r. had paid, while the client did receive invoices for the success fee. The client was even shut out from correspondence about those extrajudicial costs. The Court called this working method deceptive and held that a.s.r. had been right to refuse to continue the collaboration and to take integrity measures.
This opinion strikes the core. Representatives can have tough negotiations and can aim for high damages, but they cannot create two realities. As soon as financial arrangements are deliberately concealed, the transparency that is indispensable in this practice will disappear. This is precisely where the role of the insurer lies: insurers must be able to assess which costs are necessary and reasonable and whether the representative’s money-making model does not disadvantage the victim. The Court has made it clear that the real financial arrangements are indeed the insurer's business.
Pattern of abuses
On 24 March 2026, the above-mentioned ruling was following by one in interim injunction proceedings between Trias et al. and – again – a.s.r. This case showed a different, but no less alarming, side of the same problem, concerning a pattern of abuses. The Court in interim injunction proceedings pointed out structural flaws in case files; the failure to report successive accidents; concealment or absence of (medical) information essential to the claims handling; double claiming of loss items; incorrect or incomplete provision of information to the insurer; billing of extrajudicial costs without specification; and even the holding hostage of case files as long as those costs were not paid. The Court in preliminary relief proceedings held that under these circumstances a.s.r. had the right to terminate the collaboration and maintain the measures taken.
Remarkably, this ruling shows that proven deliberate deception is not always required to justify intervention. An accumulation of structural and inadmissible careless mistakes may also suffice to prompt termination and reporting to the registers. In this context we refer to the considerations of the Court in the case concerning a representative: “The Court gathers from the text of Article 5.2.1 and the Annex of the PIFI that there need not necessarily be (a suspicion of) criminal offences, but that this standard may also include other forms of improper conduct. However, the data to be processed – the conduct of which they are accused – must always have been sufficiently established.” (ground for the judgment 4.34).
Trias et al. tried to account for its actions by means of the information supplied by clients, but the Court did not go along with this. It is precisely the job of the representative to inquire carefully after the relevant facts, to check the client’s information, to ask for a substantiation, and to incorporate any new information into the claim. Human errors may of course occur in a personal injury case file, but business operations must be arranged in such a way that such errors are minimised. The Court found that this is exactly where things went wrong, not only given the number of errors, but also their frequency. This made Trias et al. insufficiently reliable and demonstrated its lack of the knowledge and experience required for adequate representation of interests.
We applaud all instances when insurers taking their gatekeeper’s role seriously. If insurers identify that a representative structurally acts unreliably, withholds relevant information, gives an obscure presentation of the costs, or disrupts the claims handling process, they have to intervene. Not as a show of force or to push critical representatives out of the market, but because the victims are often unable to oversee what goes wrong, whereas the insurer – thanks to its position in the process – may be the only one to discern the patterns (in time).
This article was published in Schade Magazine.
