Protects your client from adverse costs and own disbursements and where required, counsel’s fees.
Enables the client to identify with certainty the cost of litigation if it is unsuccessful and carry out a proper risk/reward assesment.
Empowers the claimant to contest claims with much wealthier opponents and provides access to justice.
The policy may be used to avoid the need to provide security for costs or at least be an integral part of reducing the amount of security to be provided.
Raising the possibility of obtaining insurance cover to protect the client against the adverse costs ot litigation (where there is a strong case) fulfills the practitioner’s obligations to their client and should be an integral process of any litigator’s own risk management.
Failure to do so raises the risk of a claim from the client if the litigation is ultimately unsuccessful.
Avoid the trap of assuming that the client is sufficiently wealthy not to bother having an ATE Insurance policy. It is, after all, their decision.
It is a good discipline to undertake in respect of cases that are considered to be strong. If an ATE Insurance policy cannot be obtained for a case, the client has a right to know and is entitled to re-assess his risks of the case based on the reasons for declining the risk.
Having the benefit of an ATE Insurance policy should enable a claim that might not have been pursued at all to proceed or to enable a claim to proceed much further than it would otherwisehave done – a direct benefit to the practitioner.