Home Insurance Legal Cover Claim

needhelp1_2

Hi,

I am currently in a situation where I am making a claim against someone - it is for a large sum. I have home insurance legal cover. Has anyone ever used this to pursue a claim successfully? I have a solicitor that has been helping me thus far but it is getting very expensive and the legal cover will only contribute a paltry sum to her fees if I go ahead with the claim. I am thinking about just letting the Legal Insurers take over so that I don't personally incur further costs going forward. I'd love to hear from anyone else who has used their legal cover. Was it a good experience? Thanks for any replies.

retiredbanker1

The legal insurers will only take on what is covered in the policy and if they think they have a realistic chance of 50% or more of winning.

DullGreyGuy

needhelp1_2 said:

I am currently in a situation where I am making a claim against someone - it is for a large sum. I have home insurance legal cover. Has anyone ever used this to pursue a claim successfully? I have a solicitor that has been helping me thus far but it is getting very expensive and the legal cover will only contribute a paltry sum to her fees if I go ahead with the claim. I am thinking about just letting the Legal Insurers take over so that I don't personally incur further costs going forward. I'd love to hear from anyone else who has used their legal cover. Was it a good experience? Thanks for any replies.

LE providers have to give you a right to decide who legally represents you but for it to be covered by their policy the legal firm has to agree to their terms... their terms are based on having a single factory style law firm that they pass thousands of claims to every month and are setup to do those sorts of volumes with hourly rates commensurate to that... I can count on one hand how many times I've seen a normal law firm agree to work to those rates.

Separate to that you have the other two hurdles of having to be assessed at 51% or more likely to succeed and that the costs of the action are proportionate to the damages... ie no one will pay £2,000 of lawyers fees to help you recover £50


One other problem you can come up against is their ability to assess the 51% chance... depending on the nature of the complaint you may have to fund expert opinion from a relevant person to confirm there is a problem, eg if you say your new car has a fundamental issue and you want to rescind the contract of sale they will require you to commission an engineers report at your own expense to confirm there is a design flaw

needhelp1_2

Sorry it has taken me so long to reply. I couldn't get into the forum for some reason.
Thanks for your comments. Thankfully we are covered so hoping for a positive outcome.

louloudia332

My partner has legal cover through his Marks and Spencer's home insurance. The legal firm that handles the claims is Ark Legal and they are a nightmare. We have tried raising claims to help with my partners' employment tribunal cases and potential civil court claims against his employer. Ark legal have been unhelpful to say the least. In every case they seemed to create unnecessary obstacles, responding with unreasonable denials and baseless reasons to complicate the process and ultimately refuse to taken on the claim.
I am aware of the 51% chance threshold which I think is fair enough but what we experienced was evasiveness elevated to an art form.  
We were naive at the beginning of this whole process so maybe we could have framed things better when we contacted them with our documents. However, later on we learnt quite a bit regarding certain aspects of employment law and it is clear to me now that the reasons given by Ark legal for the denial of our claims were just excuses, sometimes appearing as confused justifications and other times fabrications and unreasonable denials. For example, they said that two separate claims of harassment and unfair dismissal had common elements -ie. the same employer- so they would have to be considered as one case.  
My partner complained to Marks and Spencer directly who were otherwise ok but sent the complaint to be assessed by Ark Legal and untimately reject it. 
I came here to check if people had positive experiences with legal cover from an insurance because my partner is looking to change on the grounds of the wholly inadequate and disappointing experience that was just a massive waste of time. 

needhelp1_2

I have found Ark Legal to be most helpful and professional in dealing with my claim. I'm sorry to hear you have not had a similar experience.