Civil litigation

The distinction between “base costs” and “disbursements” in a collective conditional fee agreement is between:

(i) charges by the solicitors for work which they themselves do or for which they are directly responsible; and

(ii) expenses which they incur for the client, some of which are for other people’s work for which they are not directly responsible and which they simply pass on to the client at cost.

If solicitors properly choose to delegate their own work, they remain entitled to charge on their own account and the proper amount of the charge is not necessarily the same as the amount which they pay to their subcontractor (per Lord Justice May, at para 14, with whom Lady Justice Hallett agreed).

It followed that the fees of costs consultants who conducted a detailed costs assessment were doing solicitors’ work, for which the solicitors remain liable to their client, and so the fees were properly described as profit costs, not disbursements (and a success