You were already dealing with the fallout from a mis-sold energy contract. Then your solicitor let the clock run out.
When it became public, law firms signed up large numbers of clients on no win no fee arrangements. The incentives rewarded sign-up numbers, not progress on files. Claims went quiet. Deadlines passed without action. And now you are being told your claim is time-barred.
That is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of a different one.
A missed deadline caused by solicitor inaction is not something you have to absorb. It is a recoverable loss in its own right.
What you may not have been told
You had two separate claims, not one
Most businesses had a claim against their broker and a separate claim against the energy supplier. Each had its own deadline. Many solicitors sat on both while waiting for the law to develop. The broker claims expired while they waited. Those claims were not lost because they were weak. They were lost because nothing was done.
The firm was never really working for you
Many of the solicitors who signed up energy clients were funded by litigation funders who got paid for the number of people they signed up, not the results. That meant firms had little incentive to push cases forward. Clients went months or years without a real update. By the time they demanded answers, it was already too late.
Some firms just disappeared
A number of these firms closed, went into administration, or restructured mid-claim. Files were sometimes passed on. Often, they were not. Some businesses only found out their claim had expired when they tried to chase it up.
A time-barred claim is not the end
If your claim was lost because your solicitor failed to act, you have a separate right to claim against them for that failure. What you were owed on the energy claim becomes the measure of what you can recover from the solicitor. One door closed. Another is still open.
What your solicitor should have done
Identified both claims from the start. Kept you updated. Watched the deadlines. Acted before either expired. If that did not happen, the failure belongs to them, not you.
This deadline is running too
A negligence claim against the solicitor has its own time limit. Six years from the failure, or three years from when you became aware of it. If your energy claim was allowed to expire, that clock is already running. The time to act is now, before this window closes as well.
The broker got away with it because your solicitor let them. That is not something you simply have to accept.
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