Where are we now with J-codes, asks Sue Nash
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a [judge] in possession of a good [imagination], must be in want of a [solution]”.
Lord Justice Jackson’s solution to controlling what was seen as the excessive costs of litigation included a call to “harmonise the procedures and systems which we use for costs budgeting, costs management, summary assessment and detailed assessment”.
Following the publication of Jackson LJ’s final report, the Association of Costs Lawyers (ACL) set up a working party to look into how this might be achieved. Its report in October 2011 recommended that, in the first instance, an England/Wales version of the uniform task-based management system (UTBMS) codes be created as a pre-cursor to any bill of costs being devised.
The committee was then “taken over” by Jeremy Morgan QC and thereafter, comprised a mixture of costs lawyers, solicitors, in-house counsel, e-billing experts and legal software suppliers. Following two years of hard work by this committee
