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PI Brief Update

Success Fees in Children’s Compensation Claims - Geoffrey Simpson-Scott, Colemans-ctts

16/06/15. The 6th April 2015 update to the CPR makes it much harder to successfully charge the full 25% success fee where we present children. Evidence justifying the percentage deduction needs to be presented at an infant approval hearing. These requirements are set out in the new Part 21 Practice Direction and appear to ignore the provisions of the CFA Order 2013 (which allows success fees of up to 25%) because they go directly to how the success fee has been calculated on each case.

Claimants are now consumers – the reforms deliberately gave them a very specific interest in the costs being incurred on their behalf. To recap, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 changed the way personal injury and clinical negligence cases are funded. Conditional fee agreements no longer have success fees payable by the unsuccessful Defendant. Instead, the successful Claimant must pay these from their damages.

Theoretically, infant or protected party cases should by dealt similarly to other cases. However, the raison d’être of the infant approval hearing is to ensure that the most vulnerable members of society have judicial protection. That scrutiny was previously limited to ensuring that the amount of compensation was fair. Now, however, it appears that the judiciary must also satisfy themselves that we are not taking too high a slice of the compensation they need to help them live with the effects of their injuries...

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All information on this site was believed to be correct by the relevant authors at the time of writing. All content is for information purposes only and is not intended as legal advice. No liability is accepted by either the publisher or the author(s) for any errors or omissions (whether negligent or not) that it may contain. 

The opinions expressed in the articles are the authors' own, not those of Law Brief Publishing Ltd, and are not necessarily commensurate with general legal or medico-legal expert consensus of opinion and/or literature. Any medical content is not exhaustive but at a level for the non-medical reader to understand. 

Professional advice should always be obtained before applying any information to particular circumstances.

Excerpts from judgments and statutes are Crown copyright. Any Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of OPSI and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland under the Open Government Licence.