The decision in Bradley Spicer v Greene King Brewing and Retailing Ltd [2026] EWCC 18 is a clear restatement of the proper approach to deducting additional liabilities from damages, and a warning against treating the 25% success fee cap as a default entitlement.
The underlying claim was straightforward. A four-year-old child suffered a minor injury after tripping on uneven paving at a pub owned by the Defendant. Liability was never in dispute, the evidential requirements were limited, and the claim settled for £10,000. As District Judge Lumb observed, this was a case that required little more than obtaining medical evidence and negotiating settlement [11].
At the approval hearing, the claimant’s solicitors sought to deduct a success fee of £2,500, together with an ATE premium of over £1,100, representing a total of 36% of the damages. The court consequently directed a full review of the file and undertook an assessment of the solicitor and own client costs.
The judgment reaffirms that the starting point for any success fee calculation is the reasonable level of base costs. Those costs must be both reasonably incurred and reasonable in amount. Only once that figure is established can the court apply an appropriate success fee by reference to litigation risk. The judge rejected the assumption that a success fee will simply equate to 25% of damages, noting that such an approach risks amounting to an impermissible contingency fee [5].
On the facts, the court found that the costs claimed bore no proper relationship to the work required in a routine, low-risk claim. The resulting assessment of a significantly lower figure exposed a broader concern running through the judgment: base costs may be inflated so as to ensure that, whatever percentage is applied, the cap is reached. Similar concerns were noted in the recent authority of SJ v DGJ Tanner t/a Sopley Farm [2025] EWCC 17, where costs were found to have been artificially increased to achieve that outcome.
The success fee was then assessed by reference to litigation risk. In circumstances where the claim carried near-certain prospects of success, a 100% success fee, premised on a 50% risk of failure, could not be justified. The judge instead assessed the true prospects at approximately 90%, resulting in a significantly reduced success fee of 11%, with a correspondingly modest sum recoverable.
The ATE premium was disallowed in full. The court considered whether the premium was a reasonable expense and concluded that it was not. There was no meaningful risk to insure against. The solicitors’ costs were covered by the CFA, disbursements were plainly recoverable, and the procedural context meant that adverse costs risk was negligible. In those circumstances, the premium could not properly be deducted from damages.
A notable feature of the judgment is its reliance on the SRA’s January 2026 Warning Notice on “no win, no fee” arrangements. District Judge Lumb linked the costs exercise to the core duties of acting with integrity, acting in the client’s best interests, and ensuring that clients are able to make informed decisions about funding. The finding that the Claimant’s Litigation Friend did not understand the arrangement, and had been led to expect a routine 25% deduction, sat in tension with those obligations.
The decision makes clear that the court will not permit the 25% cap to operate as a default recovery mechanism, and will scrutinise both the level and structure of costs to ensure that deductions reflect genuine risk and reasonable expenditure rather than the mechanics of the funding model. In straightforward, low-risk claims in particular, success fees are likely to be modest and ATE premiums difficult to justify, and any attempt to inflate base costs so as to reach the cap is liable to be exposed on assessment.
