The BBC - No Win, No Fee

Anyone tuning in to ‘No Win, No Fee’ the BBC’s recent fly-on-the wall documentary series, hoping for an expose of unethical practices amongst personal injury solicitors will have been largely disappointed. Despite televisions’ best endeavours to prove otherwise, the spectacle of lawyers plying their trade is rarely anything other than dull; duller even than watching a group of D list celebrities sunning their ego’s on a pacific island. True, the show had its humorous moments, which were made all the funnier by the fact that the comedy was unintentional. Solicitors are not generally known for being self-effacive and the senior partner of the firm under the microscope- apparently a graduate of the David Brent school of management- did nothing to dispel the popular image of the self-important lawyer. However, the series failed to identify anything more sinister within the profession than an acute lack of self-awareness and a larger than usual measure of pomposity.

Hardly a day goes by without some reference in the media to our burgeoning ‘Claims Culture’, a social phenomenon often linked in the public’s mind with ‘No Win, No Fee’- the method of funding a legal claim that is, not the TV series. But as the BBC show established, ‘No Win, No Fee’ is in fact the only means by which most people in this country can actually gain access to justice; at least so far as the civil law is concerned. Over the last 15 to 20 years public funding of legal cases through the Legal Aid scheme has been systematically cut back by successive governments. Recognising that this could lead to a situation where only the very rich could afford to go to law the politicians looked to the legal profession to fill the void by importing the American idea of ‘No Win, No Fee’.

Our system however is very different from the US model. In the States, the lawyer takes a slice of the client’s compensation. Over here most reputable personal injury firms guarantee that the client will get to keep what he is awarded, with the lawyer taking his chances on recovering a ‘success fee’ from the losing party. The system works well in most cases and is about as fair as it can be. Of course it’s not perfect, but then imperfect justice is better than no justice at all. Most lawyers would be only too delighted to return to the old days of public funding, when they knew that they would get paid for the work they carried out, but the inevitable outcry from the taxpayer makes the prospect of this happening about as likely as the BBC commissioning another series of ‘No Win, No Fee’