How conditional fee agreements fund civil litigation — no win, no fee in principle, but hedged by formal requirements, capped success fees and statutory limits on costs recovery.
A CFA shifts the risk of losing onto the solicitor, but only within a tightly regulated framework, and a defective agreement may be wholly unenforceable. This chapter starts with the nature of a CFA — the client's position if the case is lost, the success fee, and the disbursements risk that after-the-event insurance is designed to cover. It then works through the formal requirements for validity and the proceedings in which CFAs are barred, the general and personal injury caps on success fees, and the post-LASPO regime under which the success fee and ATE premium fall on the client rather than the losing party, softened by qualified one-way costs shifting. It closes with the solicitor's obligations before entering a CFA, and where a costs shortfall can arise even in victory, including the rules on termination part-way through a case.
