Legal Costs

I note one of Lord Justice Jackson’s recent recommendations concerning costs budgeting is: “Until the new form bill of costs is developed, in those cases where detailed assessment proceedings are commenced, the receiving party should lodge a summary of its bill in a format which matches Precedent H” Is it just me or is it […]

The post-Jackson CPR remains a mess of badly drafted and confusing rules. The Glossary to the CPR defines “Budget” as: “An estimate of the reasonable and proportionate costs (including disbursements) which a party intends to incur in the proceedings.” The words “intends to incur” suggests that “budget” is limited to future costs. However, PD 3E

In a surprise development, Lord Justice Jackson, the architect of the costs budgeting regime, has come out in support of the retention, largely unchanged, of costs budgeting. The one thing we can now be certain of is that the extension of fixed fees will come sooner rather than later. This would immediately: Remove the need

Another financial year passes and, regular as clockwork, the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) release another misleading set of figures relating to claim numbers that totally misses the real story. Regular readers will remember last year’s APIL story “that an information request from the Compensation Recovery Unit (CRU) has shown the number of whiplash

At the panel session of last week’s Association of Costs Lawyers’ Annual Conference I was surprised when one delegate seriously asked if the £75,000 figure for provisional assessment included or excluded VAT. However, my gast was truly flabbered when Regional Costs Judge Simon Middleton expressed the firm view that it excluded VAT (meaning he provisionally

The Association of Costs Lawyers’ training material advises: “Whilst it is acceptable to use the internet for legal research, this means proper legal research on sites such as Westlaw, Lexis, Bailii, legislation.gov.uk et cetera; citing Google or Wikipedia and such as authority for any legal proposition is unacceptable” I guess that still leaves the Legal

The Master of the Rolls has announced guideline hourly rates (GHRs) are to be frozen at their 2010 levels indefinitely as there is no prospect of proper evidence being produced to justify a revision. This may not be entirely bad news for claimant lawyers as it was widely anticipated any revision would be in a

Further to my post yesterday, the time claimed for drafting the three virtually identical Notices of Funding was a total of three hours (one hour for each). Did you guess correctly? Being charitable, I suppose it is possible the fee earner recorded the time as being 1 unit per notice. An inexperienced costs draftsman then

I’m currently dealing with a case where the claimants’ solicitors were acting for three claimants arising out of the same incident. Same fee earner dealing with each claim. Notices of Funding were prepared; one for each of the three claimants, all on the same date. Each claimant had the benefit of a CFA and an

What are the consequences of naming one party as the opponent in a CFA but then succeeding in the claim against another party? This is a long-running issue with various non-binding and conflicting decisions on the issue including Brierley v Prescott [2006] EWHC 90062 (Costs), Law v Liverpool City Council [2005] EWHC 90020 (Costs), Scott