Filing a legal claim against a large company can be intimidating, especially if it has a strong legal team and a generous pool of finances. However, by choosing to be represented by a group litigation firm like ours, your claim can be brought from an equally strong position.
The following five factors help to demonstrate the main advantages of instructing a group litigation firm and can help you decide if joining a group litigation is the best option for your claim.
1. There are no upfront costs and low financial risk
Litigation is a costly process. This is the main reason why people avoid taking legal action against companies in the first place.
Bearing the entire cost of good legal advice, expert counsel, insurance, and court fees as an individual is not a feasible option for most.
Alternatively, there are group litigation funding arrangements available that significantly reduce these costs as they are shared across the group.
We almost always litigate on a No-Win, No-Fee basis and obtain After Event Insurance (ATE) for you to protect you from any financial risk.
ATE insurance is insurance that covers some or all the potential costs liabilities in legal proceedings. This means you do not have to pay any upfront costs to join our group actions, nor any legal fees if we are unsuccessful in securing your owed compensation.
If we are successful, we take a percentage of your compensation that has a strict upper limit. We always tell you what our maximum fee percentage will be when you join one of our claims. This offers you complete protection from the risk of racking up a large legal bill as our capped fee is inclusive of each potential cost you could incur.
Group litigation funding arrangements are designed to reduce legal costs, whilst ensuring that the litigation is appropriately financed. Spreading the legal costs across a wide cohort of clients enables us to offer attractive commercial terms to individual clients.
2. We do the heavy-lifting for you
Litigation is often a long and complex process that can be difficult to navigate on your own. Filing a claim correctly can take a lot of time, energy, and a high level of expert knowledge.
By joining a group litigation, your legal representative does all the substantial work for you. This includes entering into negotiations with the defendant and all external parties on your behalf.
Group litigators can quickly identify any common issues that may arise from working on a large number of claims similar to your own. When filing a claim individually, you do not have the advantage of seeing the wider picture and having the right procedures already in place to deal with any eventuality – but a group litigator often does.
At our firm, we have the necessary expertise and resources to challenge large corporations that you otherwise might not have access to as an individual.
3. You gain collective bargaining power
Filing your claim alongside others as a collective whole can tip the balance of bargaining power away from a large company and in your favour.
If a judge is presented with evidence of repeat offences made by the defendant, this wealth of evidence strengthens the validity of your claim.
By being part of a group action, you can also place more pressure on the defendant to settle early.
From the perspective of the defendant, the larger the group claim, the more expensive the overall pay-out will be if they are unsuccessful.
Put simply, the defendant is far more likely to quickly settle a case that has 50,000 claimants over multiple individual claims.
4. You can benefit from the knowledge of others
When you join a group action, knowledge and evidence of the claim is collected from each claimant and used for the benefit of every member of the group.
It is standard procedure in group litigation for the strongest individual test cases within the group to be presented to the judge, where all related decisions are applicable to every claimant within the group.
This means that joining a group claim secures the best possible outcome for your individual claim.
Additionally, in cases such as our Mercedes diesel claim, we are part of the steering committee where we consult with other leading law firms to ensure the strongest case is put forward for every claimant.
5. You can prevent future injustices
Individual claims made against large companies may be successful in terms of securing compensation. However, they do not attract the necessary press coverage to prevent the defendant and others from reoffending as their image remains intact.
Group litigations not only bring awareness to the wrongdoings of a company, they usually shed light on the malpractices of an entire industry.
By joining a group litigation claim, you become part of a wider movement aiming to address corporate injustices and to direct consumers to make more educated choices.
