The Law Society Gazette reports
A senior judge has questioned why costs law itself is so expensive and suggested there may be scope for greater transparency around costs during litigation.
In a roundtable convened by the Association of Costs Lawyers, Lord Justice Birss said the expense of assessing costs was a ‘nonsense’ and it was ‘absurd’ that such high fees are incurred on straightforward cases.
The event was convened to mark 10 years since the introduction of costs budgeting and held in the shadow of the Civil Justice Council’s costs review, which is led by Birss, who is the deputy head of civil justice.
‘The thing that I still do not understand about civil litigation is: how come nobody really knows how much every case is likely to cost?’ asked Birss. ‘Cases are really not that different from each other. My old clerk could guess pretty well what the case was going to cost. We seem to have bought into the idea that for every single straightforward or even relatively complicated case, one cannot say roughly what it is going to cost. I do not believe it.’
He suggested that while some litigants need their lawyer to work within a budget, others can afford to pay the difference between what they will recover from the other side if they win and what they will end up having to pay. The judge pondered whether the ‘marginal cost of fiddling around with the budget’ was worth the effort for the second category of litigant.
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