Fixed fees

We appreciate the need to plan ahead with certainty. In the provision of many services, prices are often fixed at the outset. At LZW, we believe the same principle should apply where possible to the provision of legal services.

We therefore offer you a range of fixed price legal services. This is suitable for most conveyancing, wills and probate work, immigration applications and certain other types of work where we can assess the likely amount of work to be carried out.

In such cases, we will give you a fixed fee estimate and we will agree with you when payments are to be made.

Conditional and Contingency fees

Under a conditional fee agreement, the amount you pay us is dependant on your achieving success in your claim. Following such success, we would then be entitled to a pre-agreed uplift in our hourly rates to reflect the risk we have taken and the subsequent result achieved. However, if you do succeed in obtaining an award of damages, your opponent will normally be ordered to pay your legal fees, including the success fee. It is our aim to ensure that you do not have to pay anything whether you win or lose your case.

Under a contingency fee agreement, (often known as a "No Win, No Fee" agreement), our fee is calculated as an agreed percentage of the amount of damages you actually recover. This way, you only pay us if we succeed in obtaining or negotiating an award of damages for you. This means you have minimum exposure to an outlay of costs in pursuing your case.

Contingency fees arrangements are mainly applied to employment law cases where you cannot generally recover costs from the opposing party whether you win or lose. . The operation of both conditional and contingency fee agreements are carefully regulated. They are not available for all types of work; for example, they cannot be used in family cases.

Hourly rates

In some cases, this is the most practical and efficient way of charging. Here we will charge on the basis of time spent dealing with your case. We will normally render invoices periodically so that you can keep track of the amount of time we are spending on your case. We will agree with you a budget for your legal costs to enable you to plan with certainty.

You may impose financial limits and ask us to stop work if you wish.

Our hourly rates depend on the seniority and experience of the person handling your case and the nature of the work.

Opponent's costs

The risk of having to pay not only your own costs but the other side's costs too in the unfortunate event that you lose is a worry. One way of planning for this is by taking out insurance.

Many clients already have legal expenses insurance as part of a household policy. We can arrange for you "after the event" insurance in many cases, for example personal injury claims. This can be expensive if the claim is out of the ordinary and is difficult to obtain in certain types of case, however we. will always do our best to locate the best type of insurance for you.

Payment Options

We offer you the choice of paying by bank transfer, cheque, delta card, switch, credit or debit card. Where payment is made by credit card, we reserve the right to charge an additional % to cover the costs we incur to the credit card company, and which you will be informed of beforehand.

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