So many claimants are facing unexpected or illegitimate bills from “no win, no fee” law firms that the phrase should be abandoned altogether, a watchdog has suggested.
The Legal Ombudsman ordered compensation totalling almost £1 million last year and said the “fundamental promise” of the system that success meant the client paid nothing was being broken.
Its damning report blamed an “increasingly aggressive” market for encouraging firms not to vet cases properly and then to resort to “unethical practice” when they went wrong.
Some 600 of the cases the ombudsman dealt with last year involved so-called conditional fee agreements where clients were wrongly hit with demands for “significant and unexpected costs”.
Lawyers were “tempted to try to pass the risk to on to a customer or simply go back on the terms of the agreement to get out of a problem they created”.
Others failed to explain complex contracts sufficiently clearly to clients, it said, warning that a new system introduced by the Government could worsen matters.”
