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.
Joining
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