Some lawyers are not advising people correctly…
Have you been told that you won’t get 100% compensation because of law changes from April 2013? Are you instead facing a massive 25% deduction from your payout because the solicitor you have spoken to says you can’t get 100% compensation anymore?
Well read on – because in reality, it may not be as bad for you as you might have thought…
The New law Explained
It is totally not true that you cannot get 100% compensation anymore. If you have heard any of the following phrases, you are being miss-advised! –
- “You can’t get 100% compensation anymore”
- “No one offers 100% anymore”
- “Nobody can offer 100% anymore”
- “Everyone now takes 25%”
- “It is illegal to offer a 100% compensation agreement”
All of the above statements are factually incorrect. The new law does NOT stop you keeping 100% of your payout. What the new law does is stops your lawyer from being able to recover all of the fees they used to be able to recover from your opponent.
The new law stops the recovery of a Success Fee and an After The Event Insurance premium. The Success Fee is normally a percentage of our costs that we get in addition to our fees that helps to fund No Win, No Fee cases as part of Access to Justice rules – because we cannot win them all, and we can only know if you have a case by actually pursuing it in many circumstances.
Because the Success Fee now cannot be recovered from the other side, lawyers are now taking this from their client – which was the intention of the government changes. But a cap was imposed so a lawyer cannot take any more than 25% from your payout to cover their Success Fee. As such, 25% is a common deduction because most firms are taking the maximum they can.
So, as you can see, the law doesn’t say anything about victims not being allowed to have 100% – it’s about lawyers not being able to recover all of their fees which means they cannot afford to offer 100% because of the lower legal fees.
You CAN get 100% Compensation
So can you still get 100% compensation? – Yes, you can!
We still offer it because we agree to waive the Success Fee charge and just accept the legal fees we can still get from the other side. We’re not breaking the law by agreeing not to take a percentage from you – we’re being competitive, and helping our clients to save themselves potentially thousands of pounds in compensation that won’t be lost to a law firm.
We can afford to take the hit because we take on and win such a high volume of cases and we have a huge history of happy clients.
So if you speak to a law firm and they tell you or suggest to you that 100% compensation is illegal or cannot be done, you are being misled. I can say this because we offer it – so they cannot be right in their information now can they?
So not only should you avoid these companies who tell you that because they are clearly misleading you, but it’s worth calling our free claims helpline on 0800 634 75 75 because we may be able to offer you a 100% compensation agreement. For most cases like work claims and public liability cases, we can still offer you a 100% agreement.
