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WHY USE US?

If you have found from reading the information about them on this site, that no win no fees are rather baffling in their complexity that is because of the way they have developed over time, so here is an explanation in the hope that it will help you make more sense of why the system is as it is now.

Until the mid-1990s No Win No Fee arrangements for lawyers were absolutely banned in England and Wales. The reason for this is that is was regarded as jolly unprofessional for decent professional chaps like us to sully ourselves by descending into the pit of conflict and allying ourselves with one party to a dispute or the other to the extent of even having our pay determined by the result of the dispute. Shock horror. This was regarded as a very poor show indeed and not the sort of thing that learned professional people should get involved in.

The fact of the matter is however that most lawyers did it even though it was illegal. They just kept very quite about it, but all the lawyers knew that all the other lawyers were doing it as well so they joined in. It was just one huge big silent conspiracy.

A typical case would involve a person who had no sufficient means to pay legal fees, but who nevertheless had an extremely good case for compensation of some sort, for example because they had been in an accident. A lawyer would take on the case on the basis that he knew full well that at the end of it he would get paid by the insurance company, that also paid out the compensation to the client. The lawyer knew that in the event that he did not succeed with the claim he would not get paid because the client had no money to pay him with, but he did not mind that because he knew that he would win the claim, so it was no more than a theoretical possibility.

Of course if the lawyer kept getting it wrong and kept choosing poor cases to pursue that always lost, therefore leaving him unpaid, he would not be in practice for very long before shortage of money and clients forced him out of business. And so over time the lawyers that did these cases tended to be the ones who knew what they were doing and made the better judgements as to which cases could and could not be pursued on a 'no win no fee' basis.

For the cases that the lawyers were not so sure about, or for the lawyers who wanted a guarantee of payment whether they won, lost or drew, there was always legal aid provided by the government. However, in the mid-1990s the government decided it wanted to save money on legal aid.

One of the ways that it decided it was going to do this was by abolishing legal aid for these personal injury claims. But in order to do this without leaving many people without legal representation they decided to remove the official ban on no win no fee arrangements for lawyers. Unfortunately they made a bit of a hash of it.

The most obvious immediate result of this change in the law was an army of new style accident companies represented by clipboard wielding canvassers hunting in packs around every shopping precinct and mall in the country pestering people to find out whether they had had an accident within the last 3 years; so that they could then take a claim for them, whether or not they were really all that bothered about taking a claim in the first place.

This seems to have died down more recently and the public are now getting wise to the fact that if you want to do a no win no fee claim you really should go straight to a qualified lawyer and not to one of these accident companies.

This is because all the accident companies actually do is take your claim and pass it on to a lawyer anyway. Except that in that instance it's a lawyer of their choice, not a lawyer of your choice. Whilst you might choose a lawyer on the basis of reputation or because you're a previous satisfied customer, or whatever, the accident companies chose the lawyers to send the cases to on the basis of which lawyers pay them the most money in return for the referral. That often then ended up with people in Plymouth being referred to lawyers in Newcastle or vice versa when they are very often perfectly capable lawyers available just down the street.

These accident companies are still around, although no where near as high in the public consciousness as they were for a few years. Their activity has got them such a bad name that the government introduced a specific regulatory regime just for them.

As a result many of these companies now proudly trumpet that in their marketing material the fact that they are regulated by the Ministry of Justice, which is not entirely dissimilar from a jailbird proudly proclaiming that he is regulated by the Prison Service.

Remember, an accident company is not a proper qualified lawyer, and it's a proper qualified lawyer that you need to deal with an accident claim.

The accident companies are just middlemen who pass on your accident claim to a lawyer for a fee, and usually try and flog you some wholly unsuitable insurance policy while they're at it. So cut out the middlemen and go straight to a properly qualified lawyer.