This is a common question I am asked when I am advising accident victims about their potential claim for compensation. How much does it costs to have a lawyer? Will anything be taken away from the compensation?
Well, I have some fantastic news for you – so read on!
The No Win No Fee is rather self explanatory when it comes to what happens if your claim loses. With most reputable firms, it does exactly what it says on the tin. Your lawyer will only accept your case on a No Win No Fee basis if they believe they have a good chance of winning it. We don’t take on claims that we feel we cannot win. So, we guarantee that, if it loses, we do not charge you.
TIP: not all law firms guarantee in writing that you will definitely not be charged. Check the paperwork and make sure you pay nothing (not a single penny) in the unfortunate event the claim does not win.
So – although it’s quite simple to see what happens if the claim doesn’t win, the big question is: what happens if it does win?
The term No Win No Fee doesn’t actually give you any clue as to what the charges are for a winning case. Because of this, a lot of people are left confused and want to know what it’s going to cost them if the claim wins.
Well, with a reputable firm like us, it actually costs you a grand total of nothing!
Yes, that right! If you win your claim, you still don’t have to pay us for our work. In case you are wondering, there are no deductions from your payout either. So, you lose out on absolutely nothing! Irrelevant of whether your case wins or loses, you pay absolutely nothing at all to us.
So – who pays us?
For most personal injury claims, we recover the cost of our work directly from the other side. If you are injured in a road accident, we will recover our costs from the third party insurers directly. If you are injured at work, your employers’ liability insurance covers us for our costs. If you slip in a supermarket, their insurance will pay our fees. If you trip on a defect in the street, the councils insurance will pay our fees.
It’s as simple as that – you pay nothing whether your claim wins or loses.
BUT – and this is a very big BUT, not all law firms work in the same way. You could still be charged for work or incur a percentage or monetary deduction. What you need to do is make sure that you go to a law firm directly and avoid going through claims companies or referral agencies who may charge a fee. What you also need to do is check their paperwork is client friendly and guarantees their verbal promises in black and white that you will not be charged.
Most reputable law firms use the wording of the standard No Win No Fee agreement. This usually states that they will seek to recover your costs from the other side. The word “seek” is a bit of an open ended word. It means that they will try to recover their fees from the other side. So, the question to ask is – what happens if they fail?
Under this wording of the agreement, they could easily come back to you for the remainder of any fees that they have tried and failed to recover. Most law firms hopefully wouldn’t use this power – but, some do. In fact, some are rather more explicit about their intentions to definitely charge you if they do not get all of their fees back.
But don’t panic! There is more good news. We have something called a Genuine No Win No Fee which we feel is rather more client friendly, and solves this issue above that leaves accident victims with the potential of being charged. We add an extra line in there to say that, in the event we do not get any or all of our costs back, we will NOT seek to recover them from you. And yes, the word “NOT” is actually in bold and capitals in our agreement. This means that we actually cannot charge you if we fail to get any or all of our fees back. It’s in writing – plain, solid, black and white English.
This essentially means our fees are limited to whatever we can recover from the other side. As a daft example, they could pay us nothing more than a single penny and we could still not physically charge you. Our own agreement stops us from charging you.
It’s as simple as that – we CANNOT charge you. We put it in black and white. We always back up our promises in writing – so you can trust us to always give you a straight answer.
If you need any more advice about the potential costs for claiming (which are normally nothing!), feel free to give us a call.
