Debt Recovery – Our Charges

Our fixed fee debt recovery work is carried out by our paralegal Jack Austin-King under the supervision of one of our litigation solicitors.

Debt recovery fees

Our fixed fee scale of charges can be viewed here. As an example, our fee for pursuing a debt of £1,500 to the point of obtaining a County Court Judgment is £650 plus VAT plus Court fees of £80 with £160.00 of those costs being fixed recoverable costs. If none of the debt is recovered (i.e. you decide to that you have to write it off because there is no prospect of the debtor paying) our fee is reduced by 50% to £325 plus VAT plus the Court fee.

The fixed fee covers our advice to you about the procedure, the pre-action protocol letter before claim, advising you of any response, preparing the necessary Court documents and communications with the debtor and the Court. If the matter becomes more protracted, for example if the debt is disputed, we will charge the unsuccessful fixed fee to that point and any work that you instruct us to carry out beyond that will be charged at the hourly rate for the appropriate lawyer dealing with the case. For more information please see the Litigation Team.

Those hourly rates are £125 + VAT for our paralegal apprentice, £180 + VAT for a Solicitor, £210 + VAT for an associate solicitor and £230 + VAT for a partner. We will always provide you with an estimate of the likely fee for each stage of the process and for the overall cost before the work is carried out and we will ask you to pay a proportion of our fee and all disbursements before they are incurred so that you will know what to expect.

How Long Will This Take?

Generally, all that we require in order to start the process is a copy of the unpaid business invoice. Normally a letter of claim can be prepared and sent within a couple of days of receiving those instructions. There are timescales built into the system which means that we have to wait for a prescribed period of time (for example 30 days for the debtor to respond to the letter of claim if they are an individual, and 7 days if they are a limited company) but we will always advise you of the applicable timescale until the next stage of the process. In very general terms, for a business debt, it would normally take between 6 to 8 weeks from the point of issuing a letter of claim until a County Court Judgment is entered if the debtor does not respond to the claim.

Who Will Do the Work?

Jack Austin-King is a CILEx Paralegal supporting the litigation department and his work is supervised by one of our qualified litigation solicitors, all of whom have in excess of 7 years’ post-qualification experience in debt recovery work.