April 1st 2013 saw one of the biggest shake ups in the entire history of personal injury claiming. Any agreements entered in to on or after April 1st now means that it is unlikely you will be able to receive 100% of your compensation payout. The reason is that the law changed so that now lawyers are unable to recover all of their fees from your opponent.
That’s how it worked before – we were entitled to recover all of our legal fees from the other side meaning you get to keep your full payout. Now, there are two things we can no longer recover from the other side. One is something called a success fee, that is part of our fees deigned to reflect the risk of taking a case on, and the other is something called an After The Event Insurance premium. This is to protect you from having to pay out for unrecoverable disbursements (things we pay out on your behalf like a medical report) or costs from the other side.
The idea is that you have to pay for these from your compensation claim. The way it works is this:
- Lawyers can still recover all other fees, but they cannot recover the success fee or insurance premium.
- You get an uplift of 10% of your compensation that is designed to help offset the costs of incurring the above.
- There is a cap as to how much a lawyer can charge you for their success fee, which is 25%.
According to our research, most law firms have settled at charging the ‘market rate’ of 25% for the success fee and the cost of the After The Event insurance premium to you. I expect they are recovering this from your payout at the end of a successful claim.
So now most lawyers are not offering 100% compensation – BUT WE ARE!
For accidents at work, public liability, and highways claims (amongst some others) we can still offer 100% compensation. The reason for this is that, for many cases, we have decided to waive the success fee and pay for your insurance premium ourselves. We can do this because we have a long history of clients coming to us directly for our reputation and dedicated service. Unlike many other law firms who were paying insurers and claims companies referral fees before they were banned on April 1st as well, all our clients come to us direct! So we haven’t been wasting years worth of money on paying insurers and claims companies for cases!
But there are some law firms and still claims companies who are being a little mischievous with their advertising in my opinion. You may have noticed that most websites and TV adverts have changed and do not specifically mention 100% compensation.
WATCH OUT – IMPORTANT WARNING!!!!!
But what some UK claims and compensation lawyers are saying is: 100% No Win No Fee.
Now, what does this actually mean? This doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to receive 100% compensation; the above doesn’t say that. It just says 100% No Win No Fee.
No Win No Fee normally means that you will not be charged if a claim doesn’t win. So are they saying that you will 100% not pay anything if you don’t win? It’s not very clear is it…
But I expect that’s enough to get some people calling them up, only to find that the paperwork is going to sting them with a 25% deduction!
To be nice and clear for you, we can still offer 100% compensation on many claims. So give us a call and we will give it to you in plain and simple English without the need for attempts at misleading you about the reality of when you may or may not be eligible to receive 100% of your compensation.