The claimant firm of solicitors had entered into a number of Conditional Fee Agreements (“CFAs”) to support the claims of a number of clients who had sustained personal injury in road traffic accidents; each claim was within the scope of the Pre-Action Protocol for Low Value Personal Injury Claims in Road Traffic Accidents (the “RTA Protocol”), which came into operation in 2010. The RTA Protocol sets out a highly prescriptive, largely online process, designed to avoid court proceedings in cases where liability is not contested. The RTA Protocol makes provision for the payment of fixed costs to claimants’ solicitors. Offers to settle automatically include and may not exclude the specified fixed costs. Use of the online process is made expressly subject to its terms, to include a condition that all confidential information disclosed or transmitted will be kept secret by the receiving party and used only for the purposes contemplated by the general terms. Shortly after agreeing the CFAs and entry into the RTA Portal, the claimants received offers of settlement direct from the insurer rather than via the online process through their solicitors. The claimants understood that the offers made were higher than they would have been had the offers been made via the solicitors; in short, there was an intention on the part of the insurer to avoid payment of the fixed costs under the RTA Protocol. Each of the CFAs had been made subject to the Cancellation of Contracts made in a Consumer’s Home or Place of Work etc Regulations 2008.2 As a result, each client had the right to cancel the agreement within seven days from the date of receipt of a notice as to that right. Each one had signed a notice purporting to waive that right in order to enable the solicitor to carry out work immediately.3 None of the offers to settle were accepted within the “cooling off” period and offers made within that period were not made subject to any express limitation as to the period in which they might be accepted.

The solicitors sought recovery of the fixed costs in proceedings brought against the insurer, on the basis that the insurer had been guilty of wrongful intervention by unlawful