SSB Law: the adverse costs scandal six litigation funders learned too late

The adverse costs scandal

In December 2025, the SRA disqualified two SSB directors, finding failings serious enough to affect clients, the courts, the regulator and the reputation of the profession - and concluding these were deliberate policy choices, not mistakes or oversights. Some of what went wrong reflects a feature of this claim type generally: ATE cover for cavity wall claims was commonly written at around £25,000 of indemnity across the market, a level that could prove insufficient if defendant costs ran higher, through no particular fault of any one firm. What the regulator treated differently were failures specific to SSB's own conduct: in some cases the firm acted on a "no win, no fee" basis with no ATE cover in place at all, which the SRA found reckless; separately, SSB's own conduct of claims was found to have breached the terms of ATE policies that did exist, causing insurers to refuse to pay - treated by the regulator as a deliberate policy decision rather than an accident. The firm was also found to have intentionally undervalued claims below the £10,000 small-claims threshold, apparently to ease its own cash-flow pressure, and to have appealed at least one case against a client's explicit wishes - a case that then lost, leaving the client with further adverse costs.

What it meant for the people behind the case numbers

The consequences landed on individual claimants, many of them elderly, unwell, or otherwise vulnerable - and in a meaningful share of cases, the adverse costs bill they faced traces directly back to the firm's own conduct, not simply to a policy that was too small or absent. Where SSB's handling of a claim breached its ATE policy's terms, the insurer's resulting refusal to pay left the client personally exposed to costs a working policy should have covered. Some clients say they were told their claims had little prospect of success or were asked to fund the case themselves; many who believed they had simply dropped their claim later received unexpected adverse costs bills, in some instances leading to county court judgments and bailiff visits. Costs pursued against former clients have averaged around £35,000 per case. One law firm alone had, by early 2024, been contacted by more than 75 former SSB cavity-wall insulation clients pursuing professional negligence claims against SSB, with the lawyer handling them expecting the eventual total to exceed 1,400.

A regulator's own reckoning

The regulator has faced scrutiny of its own alongside the firm. A Legal Services Board report found that SRA client complaints about SSB were routinely ignored, and that the regulator failed to heed its own warning notice about firms handling cavity wall claims. The SRA reportedly knew SSB was failing nearly a year before it collapsed.

A book that proved as hard to price as the risk was to see

When the administration finally arrived, the estate's core asset - the case book - proved as hard to price as the risk had been to see coming. Administrators said the realisable value of the accrued work in progress was difficult to assess, and unsecured creditors, including funders owed £135m, are not expected to be paid anything.

For funders, the lesson isn't that cavity wall claims were a bad idea - many similar schemes have performed well. It's that the interest rate, the staffing ratio, the pattern of underinsurance and the WIP valuation were all knowable in advance, given the right file-level audit and cohort analysis, rather than left to a distressed administrator - or a professional negligence lawyer - to piece together after the harm was done.