I disagree. Even the ambulance chasers here in the U.S. take around 40% as their contingency fee. 80% is just...wow.

Edit: "ambulance chasers" in this context means very opportunistic lawyers that are primarily motivated by money, and not helping their clients. I don't see how that term is disparaging any victims/clients. The comparison is that even outright greedy lawyers aren't taking half+ of the settlement. In this case, using £250/hr, the lawyers spent 88 lawyer years worth of time (184k hours).

The cost of the legal work is uncorrelated to the size of the damages.

Limiting legal fees just makes it not cost effective to pursue justice for smaller damages with more complex cases.

It's absurd bordering on evil to say the problem here is that people got paid too much for their excellent work (fighting against the resources of a corrupt major corporation and a corrupt major world government!) not that the perpetrators was under punished for their horrific crime.

The heroes who saved 700 people's lives deserve the money more than super-wealthy psychopathic perpetrators.

Because for the lawyers to get all the money each time harm happens means they more from harm to people than the people themselves benefit, this is a perverse incentive to keep the system exactly as it is for people who often become our lawmakers.

This also applies to 80/20 splits.

No, you've misunderstood entirely.

I wonder how other countries get by without "ambulance chasers". The only country I know that has them is the US, and their existence is the sign that something is fundamentally wrong.

There's obviously a lot of detail there, but it does still feel to me like more than £12M should have gone to the actual post workers. That's ~22k each.