‘Beyond the electronic bill’, a white paper exploring lawyers’ experiences of electronic bills of costs, commissioned by the Hutton Committee, was published last week by costs management consultancy, Practico.
One lawyer, Steven Green, head of costs at Irwin Mitchell, said: ‘When time is recorded properly the electronic bill is an awful lot easier to generate.
‘The problem is that there is no one answer to what “properly” recorded time looks like. Differing requirements from different clients means there is often no consistency even within a firm, and solicitors are not usually thinking about the practicalities of a bill of costs when recording chargeable time on a given matter.’
Another costs lawyer, Kevan Neil of Herbert Smith Freehills, noted that the vast majority of solicitors at large commercial firms don’t record time with the electronic bill in mind―‘You can’t simply copy and paste it into a bill’.
Andy Ellis, managing director of Practico, said: ‘It is unrealistic to demand that lawyers give priority to the level of granularity in time recording when they almost never go to assessment.
‘In fairness, the way commercial clients require to be billed will always trump court-facing procedures. If the court-facing and client methods can be made compatible, so much the better.’
Sir Rupert Jackson recommended the adoption of electronic bills of costs, in his civil litigation costs review in 2009. The Hutton Committee, a working party, was established; its electronic bill was piloted in 2015; and, despite a few setbacks, e-billing is now common. It becomes mandatory from 20 January.
