Motor injury and OIC volumes fell again in 2025 to the lowest on record. For claimant law firms, fewer and harder cases change the economics of every file.
The 2025 claim numbers are in, and they are the lowest on record. For claimant law firms doing motor and personal injury work, this is not a blip to wait out. It is a structural shift in how many files come through the door, and it changes the maths on every one of them.
The firms that adapt will be the ones that accept the volume is not coming back, and focus on getting more value out of each case they do take.
The 2025 numbers
Motor injury claims fell 14 percent in 2025, to 282,428, on Compensation Recovery Unit data. The fourth quarter was the standout: just 63,833 motor claims registered, the lowest quarterly figure on record. That is down 24 percent on the same period in 2024, and down 65 percent on 2019.
The Official Injury Claim portal tells the same story. 241,913 claims were started in the portal across 2025. The number peaked in 2022, the first full year of the OIC, at 298,640, and it has fallen every year since.
It is not only motor. Personal injury claims of all types dropped 12 percent in 2025, to 413,323. Employer's liability claims have roughly halved since 2019. The whole pipeline that many claimant firms were built around has narrowed.
Why volumes are falling
The direction of travel is not a mystery. The whiplash reforms, the fixed tariff for soft tissue injuries, and the rise in the small claims limit for road traffic injury claims have all made lower-value cases harder and less economic to run. Fixed recoverable costs have squeezed the rest.
Set aside whether you think those reforms were right or wrong. That debate has been had many times over. The point for a firm planning the next two years is simpler: the low-value, high-volume model is structurally smaller than it was, and it is not rebounding.
What fewer files does to firm economics
Here is where it bites. When volume was high, a thin margin per file was survivable, because there were a lot of files. You could carry the odd loss-maker and make it back on the next ten.
That cushion is gone. With fewer cases coming in, the margin and the outcome on each one matter far more. A file that runs over on time, leaks recoverable costs, or settles for less than it should is no longer absorbed by volume. It shows up directly in the firm's numbers.
The result is that efficiency and quality stop being nice-to-haves and become the whole game. The cost of producing each file has to come down, and the quality of the work on each file has to go up, at the same time. That sounds contradictory. It is the actual challenge claimant firms face right now.
Where the work is going
The cases that remain are not the easy ones. As the simple, low-value claims fall away, what is left skews toward the harder files: higher-value injuries, disputed liability, and credit hire elements that defendants fight line by line.
These are document-heavy and judgement-heavy. They turn on a witness statement that stands up under cross-examination, a schedule of loss that holds together, and credit hire arguments that survive a defendant determined to knock them down. The witness statement in particular is the single document most likely to win or lose the file on the harder cases that now dominate the pipeline. Get the documents right and the file holds its value. Get them wrong, or get them late, and the economics that were already tight get worse.
Getting each file right first time
This is where the tooling question comes in, and where firms need to be careful. The pressure to do more with less is exactly what pushes people toward shortcuts, and the obvious shortcut is dropping client material into a public AI tool to speed up the drafting.
That is a confidentiality and accuracy risk a claimant firm cannot afford, and it is a topic we have written about in detail recently. The answer is not to avoid AI. It is to use the right kind. A closed-source tool, built on a verified knowledge base and designed to keep client data confidential, can take the time cost out of document work without putting privilege or accuracy at risk.
LegalDocs Assist is built for that. It produces witness statements and credit hire arguments from a verified, closed knowledge base, so the drafting is faster but the work is still defensible and the data stays where it should. Witness statements are the workflow LDA was designed around first. When every file has to carry its weight, getting the documents right the first time is no longer optional.
Frequently asked questions
How many personal injury claims were made in 2025?
There were 413,323 personal injury claims of all types in 2025, down 12 percent on the previous year and the lowest on record. Motor injury claims accounted for 282,428 of those, a fall of 14 percent.
Why are motor injury claim volumes falling?
The main drivers are the whiplash reforms, the fixed tariff for soft tissue injuries, the higher small claims limit for road traffic injury claims, and the wider squeeze from fixed recoverable costs. Together these have made lower-value claims harder and less economic to pursue.
What is the current OIC small claims limit?
The Official Injury Claim portal handles road traffic injury claims where the injury element is valued up to £5,000, within an overall claim value of up to £10,000. Claims above those limits fall outside the portal.
What does falling volume mean for claimant law firms?
It removes the volume cushion that made thin margins per file survivable. With fewer cases, the outcome and efficiency on each one matter far more, so cost per file has to fall while the quality of the work rises. The remaining cases also tend to be harder and more document-heavy.
The takeaway
The volume is not coming back. The firms that hold up will be the ones that treat each remaining file as worth getting completely right, and that means cutting the cost of document work without cutting the quality. Fewer files, done better, with the witness statement back at the centre of the file, is the model now.
LegalDocs Assist is the closed-source AI document tool built for claimant law firms. Confidential by design, audit-grade by default. See it in action or book a demo.
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