The Cost of Your Claim.

Costs can be looked at under three main headings as follows:  

Legal Aid for Adults

Legal Aid may be available. If so, then this will be either with of without a contribution towards the costs. Legal Aid is means tested which means that your income may be taken into account  

The Legal Aid Board takes a thing called the “statutory charge” over any compensation awarded. 

The way in which this operates is that the Legal Aid Board would not allow any compensation to be released to you until it was satisfied that all the money that it has paid out in respect of costs has been fully recovered from the Defendant.

 If full recovery cannot be made, then the balance would be taken out of your compensation. This will be explained to you in greater detail but basically you should treat Legal Aid as being similar to a loan. 

If you win the case then the Defendant will be expected to pay costs.

Legal Aid (for people under 18)

For a child (under 16 years of age) Legal Aid is assessed upon the income and capital of the child and not the parents. Most people under 16 have no or very little income and probably no savings. Most children therefore can obtain free legal aid.

For people between 16 and 18 the situation is more complicated. They are means assessed on their income and capital. If they are in full time education or have only “pocket money” jobs the chances are they will get ‘free Legal Aid’. .

Conditional Fees

There is a Law Society approved scheme by which solicitors can bring a claim on behalf of a client on a “no win - no fee” basis. Unfortunately, this is restricted to personal injury claims. 

(see www.accidentcompensation.com)

Clinical negligence claims are excluded from the scheme. There is still a conditional fee scheme available but it is more expensive than the Law Society scheme. 

The reason for this is quite straightforward. In clinical negligence claims, it may be likely that your solicitor will not be unable to give a reasonable assessment of the likelihood of your claim succeeding or the likely level of damages which might be awarded if your claim does succeed until we have a report from a clinical expert to get a clearer picture. 

It is only when basic clinical information and clinical experts reports are available that a proper decision can be made as to whether the claim can go forward on a conditional fee basis. It would then be necessary to pay a premium to an insurance company to provide insurance cover in respect of the Defendants costs. In other words, in conditional fee cases, you actually take out an insurance policy to pay the Defendants costs if you lose the action. 

Your solicitor can give you more details on the premium of the insurance.