Ruling in Elias v Wallace LLP [2022] EWHC 2574 (SCCO), Senior Costs Judge Gordon-Saker ordered the claimant, the client, to pay the outstanding £27,168 plus more than £15,000 costs of the defendant, the solicitor.
The judge said the client had contested the bill on the basis the invoices were ‘not statute bills, either interim or final, that they were not signed, that the emails which accompanied them were not letters for the purposes of the 1974 Act [the Solicitors Act 1974] and that the invoices were not delivered to the claimant.
‘The defendant’s case is that the invoices formed a Chamberlain bill, that they were signed, that the emails which accompanied them were letters for the purposes of the Act and that delivery of the invoices by email was effective’.
He said it was not in issue that the invoices did not have a ‘wet ink’ signature. He dismissed the suggestion that the printed name ‘Wallace’ satisfied the definition of a signature. Instead, he said the name at the bottom of each email accompanying the invoices—‘Best regards, Alex Alexander Weinberg Partner’—fulfilled the criteria for a signature.
The judge also held the criteria of ‘letter’ was satisfied, given that email had not been invented at the time of the 1974 Act.
He said it would ‘be absurd if a solicitor, sending a bill by email, were required to send, as another attachment, a letter in pdf form which contained no more information than that contained in Mr Weinberg’s email’.
Martyn Griffiths, of Gatehouse Chambers, who represented Wallace, said: ‘The common-sense approach adopted by the court in this case prevents what would otherwise be stale claims for assessment being resurrected by way of technical arguments on the compliance of an invoice with the delivery and signature requirements.’
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