Legal Costs

I continue to see, on a virtually daily basis, bills of costs and schedules that continue to wrongly claim VAT at 20% throughout despite the fact that some of the work was done prior to 2011. How long will it take for all Costs Lawyers and law costs draftsmen to understand how this works? It’s […]

CPR 48.6 allows for a litigant in person to recover “the costs of obtaining expert assistance in assessing the costs claim”. CPD 52.1 states that those who qualify for the purposes of this rule will include a “Fellow of the Association of Law Costs Draftsmen”. The problem with this rule is that most Fellows have

Professor Richard Wiseman’s book :59 Seconds records the research of Daniel Oppenheimer and his delightfully entitled paper “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly”. This revealed that using simpler vocabulary in written text produced a higher estimation of the writer’s intelligence by readers compared with the use of

The Justice website has been updated meaning a large number of the old links are broken (again). I have therefore gone through the system and updated all the links on Legal Costs Central. All relevant costs information (links to relevant sections of the CPR, Senior Courts Costs Office guidance, historical Guideline Hourly Rates, case law,

The Costs Lawyer Standards Board has recently sent out a “Diversity Questionnaire”. Now, I know they are obliged to send out this kind of thing as part of their obligations under the Legal Services Act 2007, but the urge to return the questionnaire indicating that I’m a disabled lesbian gypsy Sikh is damn near irresistible.

Nice story from Michael Cook, author of Cook on Costs, writing in the New Law Journal: My early legal life in Leeds was full of characters. There was the chairman of the West Riding bench who, after they had found a man guilty of a weights and measures offence, was told that the prosecution was

On Monday advanced copies of the second edition of Mark Friston’s Civil Costs: Law and Practice were available for sale on Amazon and the book was 203,469 in the Bestsellers list. Yesterday I made a brief mention that Amazon were selling it at a discounted price and by the afternoon it had jumped to number

Word reaches me that the second edition of Mark Friston’s Civil Costs: Law and Practice has been finalised and is now being proofed and indexed for publication shortly. For complicated reasons that I won’t trouble you with it appears Amazon’s algorithms are currently listing this for pre-order at a ridiculously discounted price. At the time

After the disappointing decision in Simcoe v Jacuzzi UK Group plc [2012] EWCA Civ 137 we now have some good news for defendants and insurers. How should the courts approach a detailed assessment hearing where the case concerns a child, damages for personal injury are agreed at no more than £1,000 and the matter proceeds

I mentioned in a post the other day how legal aid was not introduced in this country until 1949. Although technically correct, I made the mistake of commenting on the subject of legal aid without first consulting with legal aid expert Murray Heining. He advises that this is what the Costs Lawyer training materials have