Britain’s highest-earning solicitor last year was not a tireless acquisitions and mergers specialist in the City, nor a defender of the privacy of the rich and famous. He was a personal injury claims specialist, more than half of whose £13 million in earnings for the year came from fees from the Government for handling claims from miners whose health had suffered in the course of their work. He took on little or no risk, because it was clear that the miners were entitled to the compensation concerned and few, if any, of the claims were contested or rejected.

Usually less entitled are the thousands of claimants in personal injury cases processed by “claims handlers” offering “no win, no fee” terms that too often prove far more expensive than they sound. A vital purpose of the law is to secure compensation for those who deserve it. But when the most handsomely compensated are the undeserving middlemen, the law needs changing.

There is nothing wrong, in principle, with “no win, no fee” deals, or conditional fee arrangements (CFAs), between lawyers and their clients. The concept emerged in the US in the decades after the war as a way of guaranteeing access to justice for those with strong cases but slender means. In England and Wales, since the abolition of legal aid in personal injury cases in 2000, it has become the only realistic option for most claimants in such cases.

But CFAs are open to egregious and routine abuse. They have encouraged the sort of frivolous litigation — usually parodied as the £50,000 lawsuit against the local council for injuries relating to uneven paving stones — that can tie up courts at taxpayers’ expense. They have enriched unscrupulous solicitors who claim to be championing the innocently injured when their main activity is bullying the innocently accused. And they are the basis for a new industry of claims handlers whose search for clients can lead, literally, into hospital wards, as they did after the July 2005 bombings. Too often, the “no win, no fee” promise is complicated by handlers’ advice to take out loans to pay insurance premiums to cover the other side’s costs in the event that the case is lost.

The Compensation Act, passed this summer, will go some way to reining in overexuberant claims handlers and putting the worst out of business; by April, all firms must be licensed by a new regulatory board given the task of setting tough rules on advertising, “cold-calling” and the improper promotion of insurance policies.

It remains to be seen if the Act can bring transparency to the murky nexus between claims handlers and their favourite law firms — not least because of the Law Society’s policing of its members. That, too, is changing. Expecting tough government oversight, the Law Society has separated its self-regulatory duties at last from its function as a trade union. Yet by its own estimate there may be 150,000 dubious cases relating to miners’ compensation alone. Of these it has investigated just 1200. The legal profession should regulate itself — but more vigorously than it has done.