From other lawyers, probably not! But from The Injury Lawyers, you still can!
Have you noticed that solicitors aren’t offering 100% compensation agreements anymore? You may have spotted that adverts only talk about No Win, No Fee, or you may have called a firm who took all your information and wasted loads of time on the phone with you only to tell you they want 25% of your payout!
What’s happened is the law has changed – so here’s what you need to know about it!
The Change
The government caved to pressure from the vastly wealthy insurance industry to help them maintain their profits and cut the costs of claims. Now, some of the costs in making a claim have been shifted on to the innocent victim.
It’s wrong – but there’s nothing we can do about it!
We’re no longer able to recover our Success Fee or the cost of an After The Event insurance premium. Both can be important. The Success Fee is an additional percentage of our legal fees that help us to fund No Win, No Fee claims. We can’t win them all, and sometimes we have no way of knowing if there is a claim unless we pursue it. It’s all a part of Access to Justice.
The insurance was to cover you in the event you needed to pay for some costs that couldn’t be recovered from the other side. This would be things like the cost of a medical report that couldn’t be recovered, perhaps as the case didn’t win. Sometimes it would cover court fees or the opponent’s costs if the claim didn’t win.
How does this affect me?
Now, lawyers will want to take a huge 25% from your compensation to cover their Success Fee so they can keep funding No Win, No Fee claims, and many will ask you to pay for a premium for insurance as well; sometimes upfront, and the cost can be in the hundreds.
So if your claim is worth £5,000.00, your solicitor can end up taking up to £1,250.00 from it! On top of that, they may ask for the insurance payment, which lets say for example is £450.00, that leaves you with just £3,300.00 as your payout. That’s a huge amount of money to lose – thanks to the government.
25% has been set as the maximum a law firm can take from you for the Success Fee, and we’ve found through research that, so far, most other firms are settling on it as a market rate.
So how do I get 100% compensation?
That’s simple – make your claim with us! For most types of claims, like work accidents, public liability claims, and many others, you can still get all 100% of your compensation claim.
How we do this is simple – we agree to waive the Success Fee charge, and we self insure the claim! That way, you don’t suffer a percentage deduction from your claim, and you don’t pay for any expensive insurance premiums.
So who pays us?
The other side still pays us for the work that we do. We cannot recover a Success Fee or an After The Event insurance premium – we can still recover our fees for our hourly rate, or charges for correspondence etc, or fixed fees if the case is subject to a fixed fee regime. All the other lawyers can do this too – what they should be taking from you is a percentage for the Success Fee, not for all of their fees.
So we’re not working for free – we still get paid, we just get less fees than other law firms because we don’t take a percentage from you.
That sounds nice – but why would we do this?
Because we can, and we don’t like the idea of the victims being charged. We can afford to receive less fees per case than other firms because we take on and win a huge volume of cases compared to other law firms, and we’re very efficient and good at what we do. We can afford to take the hit, so you don’t have to!
We self insure the case because other changes and agreements we have with our medical agencies mean we rarely end up needing insurance; so we cover you like an insurer because it’s not likely at all we will ever need to pay anything out!
It really is as simple as that! But if you want to shop around, make sure you take care because there are a lot of firms who have yet to change their websites to reflect the changes, yet they still advertise 100% compensation. Some use clever wording like “100% No Win, No Fee” which doesn’t necessarily mean a 100% compensation agreement, and some may say “No cost to you” which doesn’t say no percentage taken, just that they may not physically “charge” you.
Want to know if we can offer you a 100% compensation agreement? Call us today on 0800 634 75 75 and we’ll see if you match our criteria for it!
