No Win No Fee & Legal Costs

A conditional costs agreement means you only pay our professional fees if your claim is successful. If you do not receive a settlement or award, you do not pay our professional fees.

Disbursements: These are out-of-pocket expenses we pay to third parties (like medical specialists or investigators) to build your evidence. Your agreement will specify how these are handled.

The Motor Accident Injuries Regulation 2017 provides important protections for injured people regarding legal fees.

• The $75,000 Protection: For common law damages claims, the law protects the first $75,000 of a settlement or award.
• No "Contracting Out": Lawyers are generally prohibited from "contracting out" of the maximum regulated solicitor-client costs for any claim settled or awarded at $75,000 or less.
• Statutory Benefits: Costs for most disputes about weekly payments and medical treatment are fixed by the Regulation. In many successful disputes, the insurer is required to pay a contribution toward your legal costs.

These rules are designed to ensure that for smaller or straightforward claims, the majority of the compensation goes to the person with the injury.

Because CTP costs are so strictly regulated, many general law firms no longer handle CTP matters. As a specialized CTP team, we understand the technical thresholds (like the WPI > 10% gateway) and the PIC pathways needed to maximize your outcome within this framework.

Cost advice is rarely just about the agreement itself. It also depends on whether your matter is still in the statutory benefits stage, whether an internal review is needed, whether a PIC dispute pathway is likely, and whether your claim may later move into common law damages.

Before signing a costs agreement, it helps to understand what work the claim is likely to need. That usually includes:

• medical records, certificates, and specialist evidence about injury severity and recovery
• wage, PAYG, BAS, or business records for weekly benefits and damages issues
• insurer notices explaining any denial, cessation, threshold, WPI, or treatment dispute
• PIC filing work if the matter moves beyond insurer review into formal dispute resolution

In other words, cost risk usually follows evidence complexity. A relatively straightforward benefits issue can look very different from a claim involving threshold injury, work capacity, PAWE, or a damages dispute over the WPI gateway.

• Focusing only on the slogan: “No Win No Fee” does not tell you how disbursements, counsel fees, medical report costs, or adverse scenarios are treated in the written agreement.
• Ignoring the dispute pathway: if benefits have already been stopped or treatment has been refused, the real question is how the matter will be run through review and PIC, not just what the marketing label says.
• Settling too early: smaller early offers can look attractive until future treatment, earning loss, WPI, or non-economic loss issues are properly assessed.
• Not checking the net outcome: in technically demanding matters, the practical result depends on the likely recovery, regulated costs position, and whether evidence spend is proportionate to the dispute.

A good costs discussion should connect the agreement to the actual claim pathway — for example, weekly benefits disputes, treatment refusals, or damages / NEL issues.