Legal Costs

The Costs Lawyer Standards Board has started sending newsletters to costs lawyers updating them as to its work. Included in the first newsletter was a report on a disciplinary hearing. This reported that: “In brief, Costs Lawyer W failed to make required disclosures on their signed Application for Reinstatement and signed Application for a Practising […]

Another day, another costs conference. Yesterday I was speaking at the White Paper, rather longwindedly titled: Costs, Funding, Litigation, Jackson: Shaping LASPO into a Highly Developed Litigation Business Model conference on the subject of costs budgeting. This was another sell out event for White Paper. Hardly a surprise given the quality of their speakers (with

The new rules for provisional assessment will apparently follow the provisional assessment pilot scheme which requires the receiving party to file with the court not much more than a copy of the bill of costs, a copy of the points of dispute, a copy of any replies served, a copy of all costs orders and

HH Judge Simon Brown QC writing in the New Law Journal on the perils of getting costs budgeting wrong: “There are now quite a few cases being reported of leading law firms making an expensive hash of electronic disclosure and paying for it. There must be many cases where unbudgeted or low budgeted disclosure costs

If all bills valued up to £75,000 are to be subject to provisional assessment there will presumably need to be new court fee introduced. The current fee payable for requesting a detailed assessment for a bill where the costs claimed are between £50,000 to £100,000 is £980. Hearings for bills of that size can easily

I had a very interesting day at the IBC Solicitors’ Costs conference on Tuesday. I had been due to speak immediately after keynote speaker The Hon Mr Justice Ramsey. In the event, I swapped places with Master Haworth who needed to get back to court. This was a pity as it meant I didn’t get

The draft amendments to the CPR implementing Jackson state that provisional assessment will apply to all detailed assessment proceedings commenced in the High Court or a county court on or after 1 April 2013 where the amount claimed is £75,000 or less. The court will not award more than £1,500 to any party in respect

I note the Law Society has issued a Practice Note expressing a number of concerns relating to the Bar’s new standard conditions of contract. Amongst the clauses the Law Society has expressed concern over is that which provides for any hourly rate agreed with the barrister to be subject to reasonable periodic review by the

Another of the anomalies relating to the piecemeal introduction of the Jackson reforms is the treatment of those bringing claims for mesothelioma. A policy decision has been made to postpone the end to recoverability of success fees and ATE premiums in these cases. The government explained, when announcing this decision: “Rather, we will implement the

With modern computerised case management systems it is bad enough to see any estimated time entries in a bill of costs but I have just received a bill where the time claimed for drafting the bill itself has been estimated. Seriously?