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WHY USE US?

If you do not already have legal expenses insurance cover, for court claims (or potential court claims), you may be able to arrange insurance cover now. This is sometimes called 'after the event insurance' (ATE).

It is advisable to consider arranging this if you can afford it, although ATE premiums do tend to be very much higher than BTE premiums because the risk for the insurance company is very much higher. The cost of ATE cover is therefore prohibitive in many cases.

However, as against that sometimes you can delay paying the premium and insure against having to pay it unless you win, whereupon you add it to the costs claimed from the loser.

There is a downside to ATE however. The rules say that if you have it your opponent has to be told. That might mean that the opponent will resist your claim more. That is partly because they will not want to pay the premium but also because they will know that if they can defeat your claim there is an insurance company that they can get their costs back from.

Bear in mind also that all lawyers have compulsory professsional indemnity insurance for your benefit. The way this works in the context of court claims is that if you lose a case because of a mistake by a lawyer then you are entitled to be compensated for it, usually by the lawyer's insurance company paying off the legal bill for you.

This being the case, you could argue that the only risk you specifically need to think about guarding against by getting ATE cover is the risk of losing a case unexpectedly without your lawyer being at fault (eg because the lawyer did not advise you of the risk of losing). Whilst such things do happen they are not at all common.

In practice insurance companies are aware of this and if a claim is made on an ATE policy they look to see if they can make recovery on the lawyer's professional indemnity policy. If they can then they have received a big ATE premium for little (if any) net outlay win lose or draw, which rather begs the question why they were paid the premium in the first place, and why the lawyer recommended the client pay it.