FUNDING SOLUTION

Funding your case is often the most troublesome matter when it comes to lodging a personal injury claim. It is because if you fund your claim privately then you would have to pay all our charges for conducting your case up to and including trial. Conditional fee agreement is one of the ways to fund your case. It simply means if you win your case only then you will be required to pay our fee otherwise we will not charge you anything. Also, if you win the case then it is not you whom we will chase for our fee rather we will recover our costs from your opponent. In such agreements we take the risk that if you lose the case then we will not be able to recover our charges neither from you nor from your opponent.

Conditional fee agreements

If you lose the case, we will not charge you for the work we do in your case including the trial. We will take the risk that if the case is lost, your opponent will not pay our costs. And if you win the case, you will still be liable to pay our costs, but we will be able to recover all or reasonable costs from your opponent.

Success fee

If you win the case then your opponent will also pay a "success fee" on top of your damages and costs at the end of the case. We can ask for this because we are taking the risk that we will not be paid and because we will not receive any of our costs during the conduct of your case if you lose. The success fee is based on a percentage of our costs.

Disbursements

Disbursements are the money what is spent on your case. We may ask you to pay disbursements throughout the case. These could be for medical reports, court costs, engineers' reports and company searches, traveling expenses and the like. If you win, you will recover almost all of your disbursements from your opponent. If you lose, the insurance policy will cover the cost of disbursements incurred after the conditional fee agreement is signed.

Alternatively, you can choose to take out a loan for the disbursements from a merchant bank offering a scheme specially tailored for clients with conditional fee agreements. The bank would pay your disbursements as they arise and charge interest at 12.7% APR. If you win then your opponent should repay all of your disbursements but not interest. The interest accrued would be deducted from your damages. If you lose, the insurance company will repay the bank including any interest outstanding.

Insurance

If you lose the case, you will still be liable to pay your opponents their legal costs but you can take insurance to guard against this. The insurance premium can range from £265 for simple road traffic accident cases and from £540.75 to £2,000 in industrial disease cases. There will be a higher premium, fixed on a case by case basis, in clinical negligence claims. Some insurers charge a renewal premium of between 20% and 30% every 12 months during the conduct of the case. In some cases the insurer will not ask you to pay the premium at the start of the case (a "deferred premium").

In a deferred premium case you do not have to pay the insurance premium if the case is lost. If the case is won, you pay the insurance premium back in the first instance out of your damages. In over 90% of cases we are able to refund the whole cost to you.

How to proceed

In some cases we will enter into a conditional fee agreement straight away. In others, we may have to carry out some investigations including obtaining a medical report. We may ask for a payment on account to undertake these investigations and give you an estimate as to how much the investigations will cost in total. After the investigations are complete, we can advise you whether we will enter into a conditional fee agreement and inform you of the proposed insurance premium and "success fee".

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