Professional negligence

When a professional lets you down it can have a serious impact upon your life and it usually causes you to lose out financially. Where do you turn?

We believe that it is essential that we build up a rapport with you in the first meeting, so that you have the trust and confidence in us to help you.

We are experienced and specialist lawyers with deep understanding of when a fellow professional has not met the standards of advice and services legaly required.

Our experience includes claims against:

• Solicitors & Barristers

• Accountants

• Directors (the claim is generally made against the company)

• Financial Advisors

• Architects

• Surveyors

For claims against medical practitioners or Health Trusts, please see our separate Clinical Negligence section on the website.

Proving Negligence

Professional negligence is more than just a poor service. Poor service is dealt with by the specific Ombudsman in the field.

To prove professional negligence, you must demonstrate that the professional fell below the standards of a reasonably competent professional in the same discipline.

Accordingly, it is not necessarily negligent for a professional to give you advice which later turns out to be wrong, or does not give the best outcome, as long as :-

• the advice meets the standard of care and competence expected objectively and not just by the person affected and,

• generally, that the professional has fully explained the options and risks.

It is not a straightforward area of law which is why you need an experienced, specialist lawyer for this type of claim.

Proving Loss

At the outset we try and establish what claimable losses have been suffered. The losses have to be proved and critically, that these losses were as a clear consequence of the negligence and were reasonably foreseeable.

There is also a duty on the Claimant to mitigate loss. This means that the Claimant must take all reasonable steps to reduce their own losses. So, for example, if a professional makes a clear and obvious mistake but after that mistake, the loss could be prevented if the professional were allowed to put matters right but is not allowed to, this could well result in any claimable losses being limited.

Funding

We offer no win no fee (see here for a more detailed guide to how no win no fee works) for suitable claims, but this is subject to our assessment process as we take a large commercial risk in investing in your case. We will only consider no win no fee where we consider the case has better than 65% chance of success and recovery of costs. To be able to decide whether the case has such merits we may ask for an upfront assessment sum, usually between £3,000.00 and £6,000.00 plus VAT depending on complexity.