I would hazard a guess that many of you reading this blog may think you know what ‘no win, no fee’ means. The title seems fairly self-explanatory – i.e. if you do not win your case then you do not have to pay a penny.
Well, I suggest that you consider the following scenarios:
What do you have to pay if you win?
How does your solicitor cover their costs in the event you lose?
By the end of this blog, I will hopefully have answered these questions for you.
A no win no fee agreement means that you should receive 100% of your compensation. As lawyers, we should not, and do not, have any claim or entitlement to your compensation. The compensation you receive is meant to put you back in the position you would have been in had you not suffered your accident – so, receiving anything less than 100% would be unfair and unjust. I can hear you ask the question – ‘well, how do you get paid?’ Our answer to this is that our costs (i.e. the amount of time we have spent on your case) are recovered separately from the other side – our costs are a completely separate issue to your injury compensation.
The terms of a no win no fee agreement are often contained within a document known as a Conditional Fee Agreement. This should be read through and checked thoroughly before agreeing to it. I say this as we are often surprised at many of the agreements clients have signed before transferring their case to us for reasons of poor service. Many of these agreements may place a great deal of onus on the client, in certain situations, to pay their solicitors costs.
A good place to look in an agreement is where it states whether costs are restricted or unrestricted. Solicitors are not always able to claim back 100% of their costs from the other side. If your solicitor’s costs are unrestricted, there may be a chance they could charge you for the remainder of their costs – they would be quite within their rights to do so under their agreement with you. There may also be other situations where there is an onus on you to pay solicitor’s costs – so always read the Conditional Fee Agreement thoroughly. If you are unsure, do not hesitate to ask your solicitor to give you all the scenarios where you may have to pay their costs.
In the event you lose, your solicitors should have insurance in place to cover them for any losses they incur. Again, you should not be charged for the solicitors costs, and you should not have to pay anything towards the costs of the insurance whatsoever.
At The Injury Lawyers, our costs are restricted to what we can recover from the other side; so we cannot charge our clients if we fail to recover our fees from the other side. We also work under a genuine no win no fee agreement – if you have a potential claim, but you are worried about having to pay costs, please give us a call.
