No cure no pay

No cure no pay

No cure no pay is a fee arrangement between a victim and their legal representative — usually a personal-injury lawyer or jurist — in which the representative is only paid if the case is concluded successfully. If the case yields no compensation, the representative receives no fee. In personal-injury practice this is a common construction, because victims often cannot bear lawyers' fees up front.

Important to know is that for lawyers in the Netherlands there is a statutory ban on purely result-related remuneration (the 'quota pars litis' ban), laid down in conduct rule 25 of the Netherlands Bar. Lawyers may therefore not make their fee solely dependent on the outcome. In practice personal-injury lawyers therefore often use a variant:

The extra-judicial costs recovered from the liable party must meet the double reasonableness test: both engaging legal assistance and the level of the costs must be reasonable (Article 6:96(2)(c) BW).

Practical consequences

No cure no pay lowers the threshold for victims to bring a claim. Still, it is wise to record the arrangements in writing: what counts as 'success', what percentage or rate applies for a success fee, and who bears the court costs in legal proceedings. Unclear arrangements can later lead to conflicts over the level of the fee.