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Ok many hours online, much coffee and nicotine and I am still confused. I am awaiting my 6 years statements but estimate my charges to be in the region of £4-5k. I understand that breaking this down into smaller £750 chunks makes sense from the point of court action but can I send my initial letter demanding the full amount then break it down for court action if this proves necessary?
Also I notice that their are companies now offering to do the whole claim process on a no win no fee basis. Has anyone any thoughts on this? As I am self employed taking out 6 seperate small claims against the bank would mean, potentially, 6 days not working which inturn may well make it cheaper to hire a lawyer or use a no win no fee company.
Thanks in anticipation of your replies and appologies if this is posted anywhere else.
No win no fee lawyers can be a waste of time. My wife had an accident on her cycle, knocked off by an idiot on his mobile phone whilst driving. We had to lead the solicitor every step of the way - his fee ? 82% - of the final claim ( Paid by the insurers of course ) he told us to settle way before it was time and we would have had next to nothing if we had taken his advice. I took him up to the point of going to court before settling and what did he tell us?
Well done you should have been a lawyer! I would have been better going directly to the insurance company myself and negotiating a much higher fee directly with them which would have been cheaper for them overall and helped kept premiums down. No Win No fee? Forget it!
There has been some discussion suggesting that you might be able to sue a bank at its English head office and bring the case under the English rules if Civil Procedure if you have an English address which you can give as your own for service and you are prepared to attend the court in England to deal with the hearing if it gets that far.
I don't knwo what the result of the discussion was but if you searh the forum you may find references to it.
Also start a thread in the appropriate bank section and see what suggestions are made.
I would start off by contacting the English court service and discussing it with them and also ask the Scottish Court service as they might know something about it too.
I owuld certainly like to know the answer so maybe you can pm me the link for your thread so that i can subsribe to it.
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Have you searched the BOS?RBS forum. I'm sure that it has come up there. Have you tried calling the court service in each country
Please don't pm me about specific questions unless you have posted and it has not been dealt with or unless the matter is confidential. Please include a link to the post you want me to look at. If you have received a defence, contact me.
Advice & opinions of BankFodder, The Consumer Action Group and The Bank Action Group are offered informally, without prejudice & without liability. Use your own judgment. Seek advice of a qualified insured professional if you have any doubts.
Have tried searching the forum but haven't found anything yet. My claim so far is £8500 and I am still waiting for details on 3 accounts and I havent even looked at my mortgage accounts yet!!
I am seriously considering seeing my solicitor and going for the whole lot. I cant help but thinking that banks will not want this to go to court regardless of the amount because they must know they are on a hiding to nothing!!!
I will be speaking to courts in both Scotland and England on Monday and will try and get into the solicitors next week too.
What are peoples feelings on the OFT statement made this week. Will this do anything to help our case?
On another point, if when going through my statements I had included a charge that had, later in the statements, been refunded or if I had included overdraft interest which was, in part, for authorised borrowing, would this be enough to have the case rule against me?
The OFT statement will help enormously and I can't imagine a single bank deciding to go to court at the present time.
As far as English procedure is concerned:-
For £8,500 your claim would be allocated to the Fast track. For this size of claim there is a limit onthe amount of costs which would be awarded against you of £500 in respect of the appearance of an advocate and his preparation time.
There could be additional costs of preparation and of an additional representative ofthe court thought it was resonable to have someone else there too. This is all plus disbursements and VAT.
The advantage of Fast track to you is that there will be an order for standard disclosure.
This means that the bank will be ordered to disclose all of their evidnce as to costs of their charging system even if the evidence is damaging to their case.
With disclosure on the Small Claims track, they only have to reveal what they are going to rely on.
This, of course is something which they deaparately don't want as it would bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.
They might thry to resist this by relyting on privilege and you could find yourself involved in commplicated arguments as to what should and shouldn't be disclosed.
In my view, with a standard discloure order in a case for £8,500 the bank would be likely to bottle out.
the costs to them of having their true costs revealed in court would run into the billions - or certainly very high millions.
If there was standard disclosure, you would need help to argue it and also to undersatnd the information when it arrived.
Luckily we have a highly motivated accountant on our side!!
I don't know about the limits in Scotland but the disloure rules will be pretty well the same.
Look in the library at the Scottish rules
Please don't pm me about specific questions unless you have posted and it has not been dealt with or unless the matter is confidential. Please include a link to the post you want me to look at. If you have received a defence, contact me.
Advice & opinions of BankFodder, The Consumer Action Group and The Bank Action Group are offered informally, without prejudice & without liability. Use your own judgment. Seek advice of a qualified insured professional if you have any doubts.
Havent had a lot of luck finding details on the process of claiming this amount in the scottish courts. I will speak to my solicitor on Monday. Obviously I will keep posting any information back here. I am gonna go for the whole lot as I reccon your right BF there is no way the bank will want to risk court at the moment. Even if they do let them bring it on!!!
have a look at the act of sederunt which is linked in the library. It is all there.
Phon the court service. no point in paying your solictor when you can get the info for free. However, you really need to find out whether or not you cansue for a Scottish calim in England.
That is the most interesting question
Please don't pm me about specific questions unless you have posted and it has not been dealt with or unless the matter is confidential. Please include a link to the post you want me to look at. If you have received a defence, contact me.
Advice & opinions of BankFodder, The Consumer Action Group and The Bank Action Group are offered informally, without prejudice & without liability. Use your own judgment. Seek advice of a qualified insured professional if you have any doubts.
I spoke to the Money Claim people today and they reccon I can sue a Scottish company in England providing I have a correspondance address. I explained the situation i.e. living in Scotland tackling RBOS and that seemed to be ok. She asked what I was after RBOS for and when I told her I wanted to claim my charges back she laughed and said she had seen a lot of these recently!!
Yet another confused Scotsman!!
statements but estimate my charges to be in the region of £4-5k. I understand that breaking this down into smaller £750 chunks makes sense from the point of court action but can I send my initial letter demanding the full amount then break it down for court action if this proves necessary?
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