In addition, as a law professor interested in access to justice issues, I have a considerable interest in regulating contingency day agreements and conditional agreements. With respect to the first, I was the author of two studies on the use of emergency fees in labour courts with a colleague, Rebecca Cumming (`contingency cost investigation`). With respect to conditional pricing agreements and defamation proceedings, I was the author of a scoping study commissioned by the Department of Justice, in which no free agreement, including defamation proceedings (called “scoping study”), was concluded. The investigation into possible royalties was widely used by the Ministry of Justice in its consultation paper, which resulted in draft regulations relating to the 2010 compensation agreements (hereafter the DBA regulations). In the absence of Regulation 6, paragraph 3, agents would be pressured to “increase” their hourly rate to ensure that the client would not be better off if the hourly rate was completed and paid at each stage of the proceedings (i.e., they would ensure that the hourly rate was set at a level that would always ensure that the amount of damage awarded was less than the cost of the work performed). If that were the case, it would be the responsibility of the majority of the other clients, as it would effectively prevent them from terminating the agreements, because the amount they would have to pay to their representative would be prohibitive. DBAs differ, by their very nature, from other types of contracts for the provision of legal services, since the agent has a particularly direct financial interest at the end of the proceedings. In ordinary agreements financed by private funds, a client can at any time terminate his client with the agent and pay the costs due for the work done so far. Regulation 6 does not prevent the client from terminating the contract at any time and for any reason except in two phases of the law. The company is also concerned about the repeal of the provision prohibiting applicants from terminating the contract after the award of liability. This is unacceptable to the extent that it allows clients to avoid a percentage if it is virtually certain that they have won and after most of the work is completed, even if the amount of damage has not been agreed. The effect will be either grossly unfair to lawyers or simply that they are not prepared to do that kind of work.
DBAs are an important option available to consumers to fund legal actions and the government should be cautious before taking action that could affect their availability.