Costs conundrum (5)

In the days before judicial interest in costs led to confusion and complications, the most common request from solicitors to costs draftsmen was: “How do I maximise my inter partes costs recovery?”

The answer was usually: “File maintenance/file discipline.”

Detailed attendance notes recording the content of meetings or telephone calls; letters confirming oral advice; time spent on documents accurately recorded and broken down between different categories; time spent on jointly-attended meetings recorded in the same figures by all attendees. Simple.

Then came conditional fee agreements with success fees. More discipline. Record risk assessment investigations, outcomes and advice and be prepared to justify on assessment. Next: detailed investigations into availability of before the event insurance cover. The common theme running throughout was the need for detailed and accurate records, something not always popular with fee earners but litigators at least grudgingly accepted there was a reason for such effort. That reason became more