Funding an Industrial Disease Claim

Industrial Disease Claim Funding Options

Trade Union Membership

If you’re a member of a trade union, they may agree to cover your legal fees.

Legal Expenses Insurance

We can arrange Legal Expenses Insurance cover for you if your union isn’t willing to offer funding, or if you don’t already have existing Legal Expenses Insurance to fund an industrial disease claim.

Legal Expenses Insurance (LEI) cover means you don’t have to pay your own disbursements – these are the costs that come with making a claim, such as paying for experts’ fees and Court fees. LEI may in certain cases be able to pay the other side’s legal costs too.

The premium for the LEI policy is only paid when the case ends and only then if your claim is successful. This cost may be recovered from the defendant’s insurers or deducted from the compensation we recover for you, depending on the nature of your case. We can advise you on this.

You may already have LEI cover in place, perhaps as part of another insurance policy you may have or certain bank accounts include LEI. However, most legal expenses policies specifically exclude industrial disease from cover, so it’s always worth checking the wording just in case.

No Win, No Fee (Conditional Fee Agreement)

If you don’t have any existing LEI, then we can consider entering into a Conditional Fee Agreement (CFA) with you.

Under a CFA, also known as a No Win, No Fee arrangement, we only get paid if your claim is successful. We’re usually able to recover all our costs from the other side in any case, and we aren’t paid at all if your claim is not successful.

In many cases, a CFA with LEI cover is the best way of funding an industrial disease case, as this really is a risk-free way of making a claim.

What is a Success Fee?

To compensate us for earning nothing where cases are unsuccessful, HM Government allows Solicitors to charge a success fee. The size of this success fee depends on the type of claim you’re making, and these amounts are set by Government.

In some cases, the success fee is deducted from the claim for past losses up to the maximum percentage decided by Government. In other cases, we can recover the success fee from the insurers dealing with the case on behalf of a former employer.

Even where a deduction is made from your compensation, this is usually only a very small percentage of the overall compensation we can recover for you.

When we’re discussing funding options with you, we’ll always make sure you’re fully aware of possible deductions from your compensation before proceeding with a claim.

It’s important to remember that, if your claim isn’t successful, the premium isn’t payable and we don’t get paid our legal costs either, and there’s nothing to pay up front, win or lose.