You may hear the term ‘no win, no fee’ on a regular basis. Whether it be on advertisements on television, being stopped on the street by marketing people or whilst completing your preliminary research on which firm to take your claim.
So, the term ‘no win, no fee’ is common. However the term ‘Conditional Fee Agreements’ I can guess is not so familiar with our blog readers. The Conditional Fee Agreement is a document which sets out the terms of the ‘no win, no fee agreement’. Depending on the solicitors, these can be fairly lengthy documents and there is always the temptation to simply trust your lawyer and not read the small print. However, I cannot stress how much we at The Injury Lawyers advise against this.
At The Injury Lawyers we have many clients who have transferred their claim to us due to poor service from their previous solicitors. We are always amazed at the different sorts of Conditional Fee Agreements we see our clients have entered into before coming to us. This is why we like to inform and advise our readers to READ THE PAPERWORK.
When reading the Conditional Fee Agreement that your solicitors have sent, a good piece of advice is to look out for how your solicitor’s costs are dealt with. By costs, I mean the time the solicitor has spent dealing with your case. You should check whether these costs are restricted to what they recover from the other side (the losers), as solicitors sometimes do not get back all the costs of a case. If the costs are not restricted, then it is advisable to check whether your solicitor can come to you for the remainder. The last thing you want is your compensation cheque being reduced due to having to pay your solicitor for their outstanding fees.
At The Injury Lawyers, our costs are restricted to what we can recover. Compensation is meant to put the client back in the position they would have been in had the accident never have happened. This is why, at The Injury Lawyers, you get ALL your injury compensation.
The moral of the story is – before signing anything, read all the paperwork thoroughly and ask your solicitor if there is ANY situation at all where you may have to pay them out of your own pocket.
