How ‘No Win, No Fee’ is on the brink of demise

Being in the hospital is never easy. It stops everything and depending on the severity of the problem you are facing, it can make you think seriously about what is really important in life. For those who don’t suffer such a serious injury or illness, it can really set your life back.

The recovery of health has to take priority over work issues (and in some cases, they are the cause of…). All of this has to happen while struggling with limited income in the event that you have to take time off work and receive sick pay. The problems faced by hospital stays are infinite and, in short, it is not an easy task to face.

hospital treatment

I was recently in the hospital for a broken knee after falling (embarrassingly) off a curb onto the road and was told by several people that I was going to be paid compensation that was unrealistic. It wasn’t true, I just missed my steps while checking my phone. He just wasn’t looking where he was going. This, however, got me thinking. Has the world gone mad? So it seems.

While in the hospital I was told that I had broken my patella (cleanly, but I can assure you it didn’t feel clean) and that I had torn my medial collateral ligament and quadriceps tendon. While I sound like I know what I’m talking about, I can honestly tell you that I don’t know what this meant and I was in agony, I’m not even sure if that’s really what I did, but I remember. be on that line.

I was told that I would not be able to use my knee properly for another 8 to 12 weeks and that I would need surgery to replace my patella. An absolute nightmare as you can imagine. Being told I needed a new patella was troubling to say the least, and to make matters worse, after the surgery, I had to go back because they had somehow managed to put the wrong size patella in my knee (the prosthesis was wrong). measured). However, on the plus side, I’m happy to say that my knee is good as new after that.

Claim

Now, what I learned in my time in the hospital and following numerous people who told me was that medical malpractice lawsuits were common and there were numerous unpaid, unpaid attorneys I could turn to. Since my surgery had been done incorrectly, I understood that people were only looking out for me. In addition to this, I noticed a lot of marketing for lawyers during my time at the hospital, which was to be expected given the audience there. What struck me was, after research, that there was an upcoming legality issue that attorneys were facing regarding their fees. This interested me a lot.

One of the emerging problems in the last 17 years is the increase in medical malpractice claims (the article is taken from 2008) or similar. Defined as ‘lack of duty of care on the part of a doctor, nurse and other health professionals’, it can range from delayed surgery to misdiagnosis. There are hundreds of law firms that specialize in these cases and it can be a daunting task to figure it out yourself if you have a case. Trust is always an issue in these situations as you don’t know who to turn to and I really wasn’t particularly interested in pursuing a case.

The lawyers claim most of the expenses of the losing party if they win, we can all calculate that. And, if they lose, you only pay what was originally agreed upon before going to trial (thus a win-win situation for lawyers), they get an agreed fee if they lose to pay themselves (business is business after all) and is significantly higher if they win. I agreed with a team of lawyers to go through these steps and the only cost I would have would be court costs if we lose (and it would be 25% of my compensation if I win). The Telegraph reports that the end of the ‘no win, no pay’ culture is upon us with changes imminent.

Change in the Law

However, the part of the law that is about to change is the amount that a lawyer can claim for his or her cost. It has been absurd in the past. In one case, in particular, a solicitor claimed £83,000 for a court case in which his client received £1,000. Costing a total of £1.5bn in 2015-2016, this law could not come into force before and is expected to save the NHS £45m a year. It gets technical, but in short, it means that the lawyers are affected instead of the client. I can predict that the side effect of this will be that, in the short term, cases like mine where I am expected to win will be dealt with quickly, efficiently and as a ‘priority’ for the lawyers. Once this bill is passed I imagine the time it takes from start to finish is longer or someone with less experience in the companies will handle the cases (since they can only claim a fixed amount for the case). It may be an early trend that ‘no win, no pay’ cases are early practice for lawyers.

The statement by Andrew Foster, Chief Executive of Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust sums it up perfectly: “The introduction of a recoverable fixed cost for lower value claims would support more proportional payment to plaintiffs’ solicitors, which together with improvements in the system should do things faster and better for patients. This seems fair and appropriate acknowledging that this is all coming out of the NHS boat. Less money spent on legal costs will mean more to improve patient care locally.’

Brilliantly, it looks like there will be more money for the NHS and less for lawyers who overcharge the losing party for their already overpriced service.

Return to basic

Talking to someone in the industry, it seemed like the common practice before the Access to Justice Act of 1999 was to only accept the cases they were sure to win and hand pick the cases they knew they could win and double their costs to compensate. the cases that could not. It may be that this will be the case again in the future, but in reality, it might be a good thing that there are fewer ‘ambulance chasers’ in the courts which will reduce the amount of time lost for the system, but on the other hand, the costs for the lawyers could increase. The reduction in the ‘no win, no fee’ fees that lawyers can charge is a positive move and I’m predicting that the 25% ‘win fee’ could even increase to offset the lawyers’ lost profits.

https://mind.org.uk/information-support/legal-rights/clinical-negligence/#.WUjY9uvyvDc
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/money-saving-tips/9959646/End-of-no-win-no-fee-lawsuits.html