In England and Wales, for most claims for compensation, your injury lawyer has the ability to recover all of their legal fees directly from your opponent. For example, if you claim for compensation from the insurance of the driver at fault for a car accident, your lawyers should have no problems recovering their legal fees straight from the insurance as well.
With a good injury lawyer, you will never have a percentage taken away, and you will never end up having to pay a penny if you win. These are things you should check beforehand as there are lawyers out there willing to charge, but you don’t have to be charged with the right lawyer!
So, moving back to the topic at hand: how is Scottish law different?
Well, unfortunately, there are a couple of things that lawyers are unable to recover from the other side as part of a winning claim in Scotland that we are able to in England / Wales law. This means we are unable to recover all of our costs from the other side – the end result being that most Scottish law firms, and any other law firms that deal with Scottish claims, will charge a client a percentage or deduction from their compensation for a Scottish claim.
It’s an unfortunate thing, and there is no way around it.
We as a firm do not like the idea of charging clients, which is why our Genuine No Win No Fee agreement is rather too client friendly and actually leaves our fees limited to whatever the other side pay us. In theory, the other side could pay us a penny and we, under the terms written clearly in our agreement, cannot come back to our client for any amount whatsoever. We have this for the claims we run in England and Wales.
But, the issue of unrecoverable items in Scottish law means that a lawyer has no choice but to charge a client. I don’t personally blame law firms for charging clients, because the law means they don’t have a choice… unless you’re as crazy as we are here!
GOOD NEWS
As mentioned above, because we as a firm do not like charging clients, we took the rather ‘insane’ decision to still not charge our clients to recover the fees we lose out on in Scottish law, and still restrict our legal fees to whatever the other side pay us. It sounds too good to be true, right? Well, take a look at our paperwork – it’s clear in the terms of the agreement. In fact, there’s little difference between our England / Wales paperwork and our Scottish one, save for us confirming the way the Scottish legal system works.
So yes – before you start wondering, we do genuinely lose out on money by offering this. In fact, for riskier cases our fees could potentially be halved by us not charging our clients; yet we are still happy to do this. We simply take the knock and absorb the costs that we lose out on so you don’t have to be charged, and just make less money on Scottish cases. We still do get paid for the bulk of the work we do, so we are happy to do this. But ultimately, we hate the idea of charging clients – so we decided to just “suck it up” and not make as much money on them.
So – if you have had an accident in Scotland, and you are currently shopping around for which lawyers charge the least, give us a call! The service we offer is no different to that of England and Wales claims at all – the difference is that you do not get charged a penny whether the case wins or loses!