David Capper

The Contingency Legal Aid Fund: A Third Way to Finance Personal Injury Litigation

Northern Ireland missed out on all the major reforms to civil justice which took place in England and Wales during the 1980s and 1990s. However the reform movement is now gathering pace and a Legal Services Commission is due to start work in the spring of 2003. This article considers how personal injury claims might be funded. The government wants to introduce conditional fee agreements (CFAs) but widespread hostility expressed by many interested parties led to the consideration of an alternative funding system, the Contingency Legal Aid Fund (CLAF). The relative merits of CFAs and CLAF are considered in the following pages.