The Law Society is urging firms to repay any money they have overcharged clients in miners' compensation cases, it revealed this week.

The Society's Regulation Board has written to the senior partners of the 515 firms that dealt with miners' compensation cases to press them to repay any extra charges that they have collected from clients, in addition to the amounts they received under the Department of Trade and Industry's coal health scheme.


The board has reissued guidance that says that making an additional charge is likely to give rise to a finding of 'inadequate professional service' by a solicitor, unless full information was given to the miner at the start of the case, and unless the miner was made aware that most firms of solicitors did not make additional charges in these cases.


Regulation Board chairman Peter Williamson and Consumer Complaints Board chairman Shamit Saggar issued a statement saying: 'It appears likely that for most firms the additional charges turned out to be unnecessary in the sense that the level of costs in successful cases enabled work to be carried out profitably, notwithstanding the fact that no costs were recovered in unsuccessful cases.'


Earlier this year the Law Society said it had concluded 62% of the complaints it had received about solicitors in coal health claims, and £150,000 in compensation has been paid out to complainants by means of conciliation. However, not all the complaints were upheld (see [2006] Gazette, 5 January, 2).