Re: Solicitors Charges
A few things to say about this:
1. There can certainly be circumstances in which there would be a 'shortfall' as these solicitors put it.
2. In case of claims settled at PIAB stage, some insurers will make what they call a 'contribution' to legal costs while some will refuse to pay anything. So there are certainly some cases settled where the legal costs must be paid out of the 'compo cheque'. PIAB itself awards legal costs only in limited cases.
3. It would be easy to draw the conclusion that there was no shortfall in this case ( and that may be the truth of the matter). However, there may be other reasons. The fact that the solicitors dropped their extra charges so quickly may be due to some or all of the following:
A. Extra charges not justified in this case, and solicitors are in effect backing down.
B. Extra charges are justified in this case but solicitor has done a poor job of keeping the file and the extra charge cannot easily be justified on paper. ( To take an extreme example - if the claimant and\or her daughter have been ringing twice a week for 6 months to monitor progress and the solicitor has always taken and dealt with calls, and has made follow-up calls to doctor, insurer, etc. , but has been poor at documenting this work). So if solicitor thinks client is going to make a fuss over the charges, he\she might prefer to just draw a line under it ( and resolve to keep a better file in future........)
C. Extra charges are justified and the file would show this - but the solicitor is the type who would rather back down than have a fee dispute ( more common than you would think)
I concede that Explanation A above is frequently the winner in this 3-horse race, but I am not at all sure that it is the most frequent winner. That said, I don't do a lot of compensation claims,
See the courts website for a succinct explanation:
http://www.courts.ie/offices.nsf/lookuppagelink/8AFDD6975A6F081380256E7B004D9971
Just to say also - taking the extra payment by way of deduction from the compensation money is only allowed if you have the client's written authority. This is a measure brought in over ten years ago to combat some perceived abuses with compensation cheques (specifically it was alleged that claimants were getting a cheque from their solicitor without knowing, caring or being told how much they had been charged out of the 'compo cheque'). Like many regulatory measures, the rule is not really effective against a determined and cynical solicitor who might want to abuse his client's trust. However the perceived abuses were probably not all that common anyway and are certainly not common today.