Q What’s the best way to fund my claim?
‘Claimants now have to pay part of the costs’
I have been looking into ways that legal claims are funded, but am a little confused. What is the difference between conditional fee agreements and contingency fee agreements? Gary Balfrey, email
AWhen a solicitor acts for a client there needs to be a funding agreement between the solicitor and the client. Both the agreements you mention are no-win, no-fee agreements, meaning if the claim fails you pay nothing. Contingency fee agreements are based on a contingency being met; the contingency being winning the case whereupon a percentage of compensation is paid to the solicitor in costs. These agreements tend to be used in claims against the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority or the Motor Insurers Bureau where those bodies only pay limited legal costs. Conditional Fee Agreements
are the norm for standard road traffic accidents where the other side’s insurer will pay some costs and the client pays a success fee to the solicitors. It used to be the case that the other side had to pay the legal costs and the success fee but the Government changed this in 2013 to make claimants partly responsible for legal costs to try to clamp down on compensation culture. When they passed the onus of paying a success fee to claimants they also increased the amount of compensation an accident victim receives, which went some way to mitigating the impact of the change.
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Solicitor and author of the MCN Law column for the last ten years