FUNDING YOUR CLAIM ON A NO WIN NO FEE BASIS
We will usually deal with your claim under a Conditional Fee Agreement. These agreements are often referred to as ‘no win no fee’ agreements.
Under such an agreement you will not have to pay our legal costs if your claim is unsuccessful.
At the outset of your claim we will assess the strengths and weaknesses of your claim and inform you if we are prepared to enter into a Conditional Fee Agreement with you. If we decide that we are not prepared to act on a No Win No Fee basis there will be no charge to you for us assessing your claim
If your Claim is Successful
If your claim is successful you will be responsible for paying
- our legal costs;
- our disbursements (e.g. medical report fees, liability expert fees etc)
- Our ‘success fee’ to reflect the risk we take when we make our fees conditional upon the success of your claim. We will not usually recover any of the fees we have incurred if you lose your claim.
You will usually be able to recover part or all of our legal costs and disbursements from your opponent.
You cannot recover our success fee from your opponent and this remains payable by you out of your compensation award.
The success fee will never be more than 25% of the compensation that you are awarded for pain, suffering and loss of amenity and past losses. It cannot be deducted from any award for future losses.
You will not usually have to pay your opponent’s costs and disbursements unless
- you have failed to beat a Part 36 Offer to Settle i.e. your opponent offered you a payment to settle out of court which was higher than the amount of compensation that you were awarded at court; or
- you accept a Part 36 offer to settle out of time.
You would then usually have to pay the costs incurred by your opponent after the date of expiry of the offer out of your compensation award. You would not however usually have to pay any more than the amount of the compensation recovered.
You may be able to take out insurance against the risk of having to pay your opponent’s costs in these circumstances and the risk of us not recovering all of the disbursements from your opponent.
If your Claim is Unsuccessful
If you are unsuccessful you will not usually have to pay our costs but you may still have to pay our disbursements.
Should we enter into a No Win No Fee basis and the case changes, we reserve the right to withdraw from the Conditional Fee Agreement.
If it transpires that you have failed to disclose any relevant information to us and this leads to us withdrawing from the Conditional Fee Agreement you may become liable to pay our past and future fees on a private hourly rate paying basis.
If your claim is unsuccessful you will not normally have to pay your opponent’s costs and disbursements unless;
- Your claim is found to be fraudulent on the balance of probabilities;
- The case has been struck out because you have disclosed no reasonable cause of action or where it is otherwise an abuse of the court’s process.
After the Event Insurance
As mentioned above, if your claim is unsuccessful you may still have to pay our disbursements. You may have to pay the costs and disbursements of the other side if you are successful, but fail to beat your opponent’s settlement offer or accept their offer out of time.
To protect you against having to pay such costs and disbursements we may recommend that you take out an insurance policy known as an ‘After the Event’ policy (ATE). This is of course, provided that you do not have any suitable existing Legal Expenses Insurance in place.
Your ATE Insurer would pay your opponents costs and disbursements and our disbursements rather than you having to pay them.
Should you accept our advice to take out After the Event insurance you will be liable to pay the cost of the premium for the insurance policy out of your compensation award if your claim is successful. You would not usually have to pay the premium if your claim is unsuccessful.
If we do recommend that you obtain such a policy we will recommend a suitable policy to you and, on your instructions, will arrange this policy. You are not obliged to take out the policy we recommend and you should seek independent financial advice if you have any concerns about our recommendation. Similarly, if we do not believe that taking out a policy is in your best interests, we will advise you accordingly.
We will set out the reasons why we believe that you need an ATE policy and why we believe the policy that we have recommended meets those needs in a ‘Demands and Needs’ statement.
We are not financial advisers and do not conduct an analysis of the insurance market when making any recommendations and only do so because we are confident that that policy will meet your requirements.
This firm is not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority. However, we are included on the register maintained by the Financial Conduct Authority so that we can carry on insurance mediation activity, which is broadly the advising on, selling and administration of insurance contracts.
This part of our business, including arrangements for complaints or redress if something goes wrong, is regulated by Solicitors Regulation Authority. The register can be accessed via the Financial Conduct Authority website at www.fca.org.uk/register
We are required to inform you that the Law Society is a designated professional body for the purposes of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, but responsibility for regulation and complaints handling has been separated from the Law Society’s representative functions. The Solicitors Regulation Authority is the independent regulatory body of the Law Society. Complaints are handled by the Legal Ombudsman.