Now the term ‘no win, no fee’ is a term which most of us are familiar with. This may be due to personal injury advertisements on the television and radio or from someone on the street stopping you for marketing purposes.
So, ‘no win no fee’ may be a term we are used to hearing, but do we really know what it means. Well at The Injury Lawyers we are here to inform and educate our blog readers in all aspects of personal injury and so to fulfil our duty we write this blog to educate you on one of the most important parts of bringing your claim – the no win, no fee agreement.
No win no fee means that if you do not win your case you do not pay any of the solicitors costs in dealing with the claim. So you may think – ‘How do we get paid?’ Well, in the event you lose your claim we have insurance which covers anything we paid out as a result of your claim – however, we lose being paid on any of the time we spent on your case. So it is a risk to the solicitor in taking on a case – however a solicitor will only ever take your case on if they believe there are genuine prospects for success. However, even if you win your case, you still pay none of our costs – you get 100% of your compensation and no bill from the solicitor. This is because the other side pay our costs and we take nothing from your compensation. Compensation is meant to put the claimant back in the position they would have been in had the accident never happened, therefore if the solicitor took a portion of this, the victim would not have been fully compensated.
In view of the above you may think you have nothing to lose by bringing a claim using no win no fee; this however is not always the case. When coming to sign your no win no fee agreement, known formally as a Conditional Fee Agreement, always READ IT THOROUGHLY BEFORE SIGNING. There are many items which a solicitor can add which means you may have to pay something out of your own pocket. For example, check whether the solicitor’s costs are restricted to what they can recover from the other side. If they are not restricted they may be able to come to you for the remainder. Always ask the solicitor if there is any situation where you may have to pay.
At The Injury Lawyers our costs are restricted to whatever we recover, so we simply cannot charge you for a successful claim if we can’t get all of our fees back.
