Is No-Win-No-Fee Destroying the Law of Libel?
Libel actions have recently hit the news with critics fuming at the allegedly handsome payouts to lawyers thanks to ‘no win, no fee’ deals. Do the critics have a point or is no win, no fee simply providing the access to justice envisaged when Conditional Fee Arrangements(CFA’s) were first introduced? In defense of using no win no fee for libel actions, CFA’s have helped provide the means for a person to bring a claim in a field where newspapers and magazines carry the financial clout and using the scheme redresses the balance. That was the intention of Lord Woolf’s Access to Justice Reforms in the first place. The Department of Constitutional Affairs (DCA) is re-visiting the whole system in an attempt to address concerns that libel lawyers are bringing in inflated ‘success fees’ and hiking their legal fees in the process. Under a CFA, if a claimant lawyer loses a claim, he does not get paid, but if he wins, he is paid a bonus, known as a “success fee.” This has in turn led to allegedly
