My god I wish I had found a succinct yet not dumbed-down summary of this sort of stuff when I was dealing with a personal injury case. I can't help but feel that the legal profession (not lawyers themselves) functions largely on information-hiding. Perhaps I should make a summary... I don't know if this is a good topic for wikibooks.

A summary of how CFA fee structures work

Okay so I want to make sure you have a good understanding of how the fee structure works:

CFA's operate as a cap on legal costs so that the law firm can only take costs and success fee up to say 25% of your award (this is the legal maximum).

Separate to this, if you win they will charge you:

• Their costs
  
• The product of their costs and the success percentage
  
• Less any money they recoup from the counter-party
  
  If you obtain no money they will charge you nothing.
  
  Amount paid on winning = minimum(Costs - Reclaimable percentage Costs - Success fee Costs, cap * Awa
  
  The figures you were quoted were pretty standard. I got quoted a 15% cap by some people. I have read on the internet about people getting a 50% success fee before going to trial.
  
  

  Alternative fee structures
  

  
  My understanding is that CFAs are the industry standard for how cases are funded. I kind of suggested not wanting to take a CFA and wasn't magically greeted with alternatives.
  
  

  Likely payout
  

  
  I imagine 10000 GBP is on the high side unless you have missed a bunch of work and not been paid for it or have a pretty nasty injury (i.e. joint injuries), or the prospect of future medical costs (e.g. arthritis). The legal system would seem to value your reputation a lot more highly than your limbs.
  
  You should go and read this book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Guidelines-Assessment-General-Damages-Personal/dp/019875762X/ref=dp_ob_title_bk to find out what your likely payment is. This is what lawyers and judges and everyone uses to value damages. It is pretty much equivalent to case law. Your lawyer will just read this book find the appropriate section and tell you it. The judge in a case will read this book find the appropriate section and have a guess of where your injury falls in this section.
  
  

  Rant about personal injury damages guidance
  

  
  Having a bit of a moan: The fact that this book is not in the public domain is a real disgrace and the judicial college and the author of the book should feel and enduring sense of shame for how much uncertainty and wasted time they impose upon individuals by choosing to sell this book for a profit. Further, the lack of clarity and referencing in this book that has become a defacto standard for decision making again is a source of needless uncertainty and suffering.
  
  In their defence, this book was written before the advent of the internet and BAILII, so at the time of writing selling the book may have been an efficient means of transmitting this information. However, if the law commission is able to publish reports from the 1960s on the internet the judicial college should be able to publish this canonical document.
  
  It is slightly galling, to find you can't assess the value of an injury and because the author was unwilling to take the 10 minutes to list the cases that he spent hours reading "for the sake of brevity". As a reference work, brevity is not really the readers concern.
  
  The cynic in me thinks that the reason of not quoting cases might be because
  
  

• there is no case law basis for the valuations but the author wanted to create one
  
• the author wanted to leave judges as much discretion as possible.
  
  

  Nature of legal costs
  

  
  The issue in personal damage cases tends not to be about liability or non-liability rather how much the other party is willing to pay you and this is the reason that you end up going to court. (Although the possibility of the other part not being liable with push down the amount they offer you).
  
  The government introduced a system call one way qualified cost shifting: http://www.hardwicke.co.uk/insights/archive/articles/an-introduction-to-qualified-one-way-costs-shifting-new-cpr-4413-17 to encourage parties to settle out of court. Lawyers didn't seem that good at explaining this to me in conversations and I have a enduring interest in game theory, economics and evolutionary biology. So I would suggest getting an understanding of this from reading before talking to a lawyer.
  
  

  Economic discussion of incentives
  

  
  Regarding costs there are a couple of other things you should consider. I imagine lawyers are a pretty respectable profession; their costs will be accurate and they will work diligently on what they are doing regardless of funding meethod. On the other hand, there is a benefit of them having some skin in the game: this is an advantage of CFAs. This would probably show up when lawyers professionally and competently do something that you tell them to do which is a bad idea, or competently finish something that is not valuable for you. As such, if I was doing anything complicated I would want to incentivise lawyers with a share of the proceeds.
  
  On the other hand, before a case goes to court when you are just going through the correct legal motions, I feel these incentives are less important. This is mostly just me thinking out loud: a real lawyers experience would be useful here.
  
  If I was feeling forceful and energetic I might consider self funding until you have an offer from your counteryparty, but then taking on a CFA if you choose to go court. However I had no experience with this.
  
  In my case getting to the point of a having an offer cost about 3000 pounds though there were some complicating issues here.
  
  I imagine you could also tell your lawyer "don't spend more than this" and after this stage obtain a CFA. I don't know how happy lawyers are with this sort of stuff. I imagine they find collecting payment boring and lawyering interesting: a CFA gets rid a bunch of boring admin for them. "We win, we give you some money, done".
  
  There is also the complex question of loss aversion on the party of their customers, and them not wanting to be responsible for their clients actively losing money from a case.
  
  

  Where you get your lawyers
  

  
  It is perfectly possible to carry out this sort of case without ever speaking to your lawyer, so you can find lawyers from anywhere in the country and compare their fees.
  
  The exception to this might be if the injuries are very traumatic (or you are finding them traumatic) in which case seeing a lawyer in person can be advantageous from the point of view of not having another relationship to manage.
  
  (Edit: fix up lots of grammar mistakes... reddit is not the best medium for essay!)