Why your solicitor may not be entitled to deduct 25% of your damages.
Since April 2013, the Government changed the rules around Solicitors costs and their success fees. Without getting too technical, it allowed Solicitors to deduct up to 25% of people’s damages; to cover the loss of the success fee in their costs.
Some Solicitors took this to mean that they could automatically take 25% of what people received, however this is not the case. The Solicitor can only deduct 25% of your damages if they say that they have done an amount of work equal to the value of the 25% deduction.
For example, If your claim settles for £10,000, some solicitors were automatically deducting £2,500.
However, they may not have completed work to the value of £2,500 they may have only done work to the value of £1,200 on your case. Your Solicitors should have costed the file and advised you how much the bill would have been, had you have been a private paying client. This is then the value of how much they can deduct from your compensation (up to a maximum of 25%).
There are now several firms that are obtaining peoples old files of papers from their previous solicitors to evaluate the previous solicitors costs to see if they deducted too much from their clients damages and this will then be refunded to the clients, and their legal fees for recovering the money will have to be paid by their old solicitors.
These claims are being run on no win, no fee agreements which again would be subject to a maximum of 25% of damages, if that amount of work has been done on the matter. So essentially, claimants will receive a refund but not the full refund.
If you believe that your solicitors deducted too much from your compensation then call one of our experts how will be able to advise you further.