What is “No Win No Fee”?
After the initial free assesment of your compensation claim against a landlord, should your compensation claim be considered, you can decide to instruct the personal injury solicitor on a ‘no win no fee’ basis. What this means is, if the solicitor wins your claim, the solicitor will recover 100% compensation and also the legal costs will be recovered from the landlords insurer. You will be paid 100% of the compensation that is recovered and the solicitor will be paid the legal fees. Should you lose your claim, then you will not pay your solicitors legal costs as the personal injury compensation solicitor works on a ‘no win no fee’ basis. Also when you initially instruct the personal injury compensation solicitor, the solicitor will cover the risk of you having to pay the othersides fees. Therefore providing that you cooperate with the solicitor and do not provide misleading or fraudulent information, should you lose your claim you will have nothing to pay.
No Win No Fee is the term used to describe the Conditional Fee Agreement or CFA between a law firm and their client. In a Personal Injury claim, this is an agreement between the client and their lawyer, which will enable the lawyer to take on a personal injury case on the understanding that if they lose the case, the client will not have to pay their lawyer’s costs. However if the lawyer wins the case they will be entitled to their standard fee plus an uplift referred to as a success fee. In English law, the success fee cannot be greater than 100% of the lawyer’s standard fee.
One of the principles of English law is that the loser in a Court case pays the costs of the winner in addition to their own. In no-win, no-fee cases, the Solicitor agrees not to charge a fee unless the action is successful. This means that if you instruct a firm of Solicitors on a no-win, no-fee basis, your risk as to costs is limited to the other side’s costs plus any ‘disbursements’ (such as the cost of expert witness reports) incurred by your Solicitors and the Court costs. You can, however, buy insurance to cover these costs and it is generally recommended that you do so. Running a legal action on a no-win, no-fee basis with costs insurance means the Solicitor is taking the largest financial risk. Since a Court case will only take place if both parties to the dispute think they have a good chance of winning, the Solicitor will normally charge a ‘success fee’, which is an extra fee designed to compensate them for the risk that you may lose and they do not get paid. The success fee
