Are you looking to make a claim for personal injury compensation? Where you expecting to get 100% of your payout, only to find lawyers are now talking about taking up to 25% from your payout instead? Or have you just got some paperwork through from a firm who neglected to mention that up to a quarter of your compensation will be swallowed up by them in legal fees?
The reason for the sudden U-turn in lawyers offering 100% compensation is because the government has changed the law on April 2013.
Many law firms are misadvising people because they don’t understand the changes. Some are potentially misleading people with offers like “100% No Win, No Fee” which isn’t actually confirming you will receive 100% of your compensation.
So trust The Injury Lawyers to give you the facts about what you really need to know about the changes:
WHY This Has Happened
The media has fuelled an alleged compensation culture. The existence of such a thing is highly debatable. What is true though is that the rich politicians of our country often have a lot of money in businesses, and the insurance industry is one of their favourites. But I’ll put to rest the issue of whether there is or isn’t any “conspiracy” insofar as the government and the insurance industry. I would of course never suggest such a thing; but sources from big media names in the past have touched on such an issue…
The government decided to change the law to stop lawyers recovering all of their legal fees from the opponent. In a simple sense this isn’t fair – why should the victim have to pay to claim? But what’s done is done – the government have stopped you being able to recover two things:
- Success Fee – which helps lawyers to fund No Win, No Fee claims as part of a history of access to justice for those who cannot afford to pay for legal services.
- After The Event insurance premium – a premium for insurance to protect you from having to pay costs to the other side and to cover you from unrecovered disbursements. Disbursements are things we pay out for you like expert reports.
So because these can now no longer be recovered from the other side, lawyers are looking to their clients for recovery of the Success Fee and insurance premium.
WHY 25%?
25% appears to be the market trend. This is because the government imposed a cap so lawyers cannot take any more than 25% from the client’s compensation to cover their Success Fee. On top of that, they are asking for payment of insurance as well.
So most firms are basically taking the most that they can.
So can I still get 100% compensation at all?
With other firms, the answer is no.
But with The Injury Lawyers, the answer is yes!
For most claims like work accidents and public liability claims we still offer you a 100% compensation agreement.
How can we do this when others can’t?
Simple:
- We still get paid for the work we do – we just don’t get as much as we used to. Essentially, we are taking the hit instead of you.
- We don’t have to charge you just because the law says we can. It’s a business decision.
- We take on and win such a high volume of claims that the reduced fees work just fine for us.
Why are we doing this?
Because we don’t think it’s fair that you should have to pay to claim. We can afford to take the hit as we specialise in personal injury claims so we are efficient at what we do, and we take on and win a high volume of cases.
