Council claims can be risky – and thanks to government law changes that happened in April 2013, lawyers are not allowed to recover the same level of fees we used to be able to. The result is that other lawyers will now want to deduct up to 25% from your compensation to cover their Success Fee which is designed to help offset the cases we take on and cannot win.
But we can still offer you a 100% compensation agreement for a council claim. So read on for more info!
How we offer 100%
We still get paid by the other side, and so do all the other lawyers; we just don’t get as much as we used to be able to. It is true that council claims can be very risky because it is difficult to tell whether they can defend the claim at the outset, and they can easily defend the claim as the law is much more favourable on their side.
All they have to do is prove that they have a reasonable system of inspection and maintenance, and show that they have kept to it, and they can defend the claim on the basis that whatever defect caused your accident wasn’t there the last time they inspected the area. They also need to show that they had no reasonable prior knowledge as well – i.e. that it hadn’t been reported before the accident and nothing had been done about it.
But despite the fact they’re risky, we agree for our clients that we will waive our Success Fee charge and just accept the general fees we are still allowed to from the other side.
Why do we do this?
Because we don’t believe its right that you should lose money because the government changed the law, and because we, importantly, can afford to offer this.
As I said, we still get paid by the other side; we just get less fees in comparison to what we used to. But we can afford to take the hit and not charge you the 25% that most other firms will because we take on and win a high volume of claims. This allows us to take the competitive edge and offer our clients 100% compensation agreements.
There are no other charges or deductions to offset this either – if your claim is settled at £5,000.00, you will receive £5,000.00. It’s as simple as that.
A simple process and No Win, No Fee
We also offer No Win, No Fee agreements as well, so you shouldn’t get charged if the claim is not successful. To be fair, for most claims, all we need to do to find out what the council position is by submitting a Claim Notification Form to them. It doesn’t cost much in time or money for us to do this.
For help and advice, call 0800 634 75 75 today.
