To be pedantic, "How the legal system works in countries with class-action lawsuits and contingency fee billing".
Class-action lawsuit: where you're allowed to sue on behalf of a huge group of people, for all of them.
Contingency fee: where the lawyer takes a percentage of the damages awarded, rather than a gradated fee.
Neither is allowed in either England or (AFAIK) Scotland, because, well, neither country has decided to makes its legal system stupid in that particular way.
I know we don't have class-action suits - but I thought there had been situations over here where people had won court cases and the legal fees had then been higher than the costs they got - and because of the "no win, no fee" they were worse off than if they had lost.
That should be a very rare occurrence. Usually the court will make an order for all costs against the losing party and it will be paid by them or (more often) their insurance company.
Not quite. Usually, if you win a case, you will get about 75-80% of your costs back from the other side. So yes, to answer andrewducker's point, you probably won't get all your costs back, but hopefully your damages will exceed the shortfall. A lawyer ought to make it clear if a prospective lawsuit is likely to end up costing more than it brings in.
What, to be more specific, we don't have is a system where your lawyer gets a percentage of the damages if you win. There are such things as conditional fee agreements, but those involve an uplift (say 50%) above normal-rate fees if you win, and no fee if you lose. (As ever, it's never as simple as that; a so-called 'no-win, no-fee' agreement still involves lots of other expenses you pay along the way.)
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Class-action lawsuit: where you're allowed to sue on behalf of a huge group of people, for all of them.
Contingency fee: where the lawyer takes a percentage of the damages awarded, rather than a gradated fee.
Neither is allowed in either England or (AFAIK) Scotland, because, well, neither country has decided to makes its legal system stupid in that particular way.
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What, to be more specific, we don't have is a system where your lawyer gets a percentage of the damages if you win. There are such things as conditional fee agreements, but those involve an uplift (say 50%) above normal-rate fees if you win, and no fee if you lose. (As ever, it's never as simple as that; a so-called 'no-win, no-fee' agreement still involves lots of other expenses you pay along the way.)