As ADR Grows in Motor Claims, Your Documents Become the Whole Case

One claimant firm reports a 230 percent year-on-year rise in ADR cases. In arbitration and mediation there is no cross-examination and no judge to persuade in person. The paper does all the work.

Paul Taylor, chief commercial officer at Minster Law, told Insurance Post this month that the firm has seen a 230 percent year-on-year increase in ADR cases. His argument was that the motor claims industry should be more proactive about adopting alternative dispute resolution, to cut costs and to get around court waiting times.

Two honest caveats before we build anything on that.

First, it is one firm's internal number. It is a year-on-year rise in case volume, not a share of the market and not a proportion of disputes, and no baseline figure was published alongside it. A 230 percent increase could be a small number becoming a slightly less small number. We do not know, and neither does anyone else outside Minster Law.

Second, it is a claimant personal injury practice reporting on its own book. It is a signal, not a survey.

So we are not going to pretend it is proof of a market-wide shift. What it is, though, is one more data point in a direction the profession has been moving for a while, and the direction is not really in doubt. Court waiting times are long. Fixed recoverable costs have squeezed the economics of running a file to trial. Both sides have an incentive to resolve disputes without a hearing. Minster's own published work on ADR describes resolving disputed quantum in days rather than months.

If you accept that direction of travel, there is a consequence that claimant firms need to think about carefully, because it goes to the heart of how these cases actually get won.

What disappears in ADR

Take a disputed quantum case to a hearing and you have levers. Your client can give evidence. A judge forms an impression of them. Your advocate can rehabilitate a wobbly answer, press a weak point in the defendant's case, and read the room. A witness statement that is merely adequate on paper can be carried across the line by a claimant who comes across as straightforward and credible in the box.

Now take the same dispute into arbitration or a documents-only process.

There is no box. There is no cross-examination. There is nobody forming an impression of your client, because your client is not in the room, and frequently there is no room. The decision-maker reads what you sent, reads what the defendant sent, and decides.

Everything you would have relied on the hearing to fix has to already be on the page.

That is the shift, and it is easy to miss because it looks like a procedural change rather than a substantive one. It is not. In ADR, the documents stop supporting the case. They are the case.

Where that bites on a motor file

Think about which documents are actually carrying the weight.

The witness statement. In a hearing, a statement opens the door and oral evidence walks through it. In ADR, the statement is the evidence. If it is vague on the sequence of events, if it deals with the client's financial position in general terms rather than specific ones, if it leaves an obvious question unanswered, there is no second chance to answer it. The gap just sits there while somebody decides against you.

The schedule of loss. Every head of loss has to be evidenced and internally consistent on its face. In a hearing you might get the chance to explain an apparent discrepancy. On paper, an apparent discrepancy simply reads as a discrepancy.

Credit hire elements, where they arise. Anyone who has run a contested credit hire argument knows how much of it turns on evidence that is easy to describe and tedious to actually assemble. Rate evidence. Period. Need. And the perennial one, impecuniosity, where the case is not usually lost on the legal test but on the completeness of the financial picture put in front of the tribunal. Take away the hearing, and an incomplete impecuniosity bundle is not something you can talk your way around. It is just incomplete.

The common thread is that ADR is unforgiving of a file that was going to be tidied up later. There is no later.

Why this is still good news

It would be easy to read that as an argument against ADR. It is not.

Faster resolution is good for clients. Lower cost is good for firms operating under fixed recoverable costs. Getting a disputed quantum decision in days rather than waiting many months for a listing is, on any sensible view, a better service. The reason to pay attention is not that ADR is a threat, it is that ADR rewards a specific competence, and firms that build that competence will do better in it than firms that do not.

The competence is document quality, produced consistently, at a cost the file can bear.

Which is the hard part. Because doing the documents properly has always been possible for any firm willing to spend enough fee earner time on them. The question fixed costs forces on you is whether you can do it properly on a file that does not have enough budget for a senior lawyer to spend a full day drafting.

Getting it right first time, at a cost the file can carry

This is exactly the pressure that pushes people toward shortcuts, and the obvious shortcut is dropping client material into a public AI tool to speed up drafting.

That is a confidentiality and accuracy risk a claimant firm cannot take, and it is something we have written about in detail before, in our piece on how putting client documents into ChatGPT can become a data breach. The answer is not to avoid AI. It is to use the right kind of AI.

A closed system, built on a verified legal knowledge base, that keeps client data confidential and produces work you can actually stand behind. That is what LegalDocs Assist is for. It drafts witness statements and credit hire arguments from a verified, closed knowledge base, so the time cost of document work comes down while the work stays defensible.

In a world where the hearing was the safety net, "good enough on paper" was survivable. As ADR grows, the paper is all there is. Good enough stops being good enough.

Frequently asked questions

What is alternative dispute resolution in motor claims?

ADR covers ways of resolving a dispute without a court hearing, including mediation, arbitration and online or documents-only determination. In motor claims it is most commonly used for disputed quantum, where the parties agree liability but disagree on value.

Is ADR growing in motor claims?

The direction of travel points that way, though hard market-wide data is limited. Minster Law's chief commercial officer, Paul Taylor, told Insurance Post in July 2026 that the firm had seen a 230 percent year-on-year increase in ADR cases, and argued the industry should adopt ADR more proactively to cut costs and court delays. That is a single firm's internal figure rather than a market survey, so it should be read as a signal rather than proof.

How does ADR change the way a claimant case is won?

It removes oral evidence. There is no cross-examination and, in documents-only processes, no opportunity for a claimant to make an impression on the decision-maker in person. Everything the case depends on has to be complete and persuasive within the documents themselves, which puts far more weight on the witness statement and the schedule of loss.

What does ADR mean for credit hire arguments?

Credit hire disputes turn on evidence that is often assembled late, particularly on rate, period, need and impecuniosity. In a hearing, gaps can sometimes be addressed through oral evidence. In ADR they cannot. An incomplete impecuniosity bundle in a documents-only process is simply an incomplete bundle, and it will be decided as such.

The takeaway

ADR is coming, unevenly and without much fanfare, and mostly it is a good thing. But it quietly removes the safety net that a lot of files have been relying on without anyone saying so out loud. When there is no hearing, there is no chance to fix on the day what should have been fixed in the drafting.

Fewer hearings. Better documents. That is the trade, and it is worth making, as long as you make the second half of it.

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