The Master of the Rolls, Sir Terence Etherton and Lord Justice Leggatt criticised solicitors AMZ Law for submitting £71,072 costs, and cut the recoverable costs to £13,000. Leggatt LJ said, in his view, a reasonable allowance for the costs incurred by the solicitors on the appeal would be £4,500 (representing 20 hours of work at an hourly rate of £225).
He said counsel’s fees of £6,662.50 for both advice and the hearing were ‘reasonable and proportionate’. However, AMZ Law’s costs included ‘very large sums which appear, on their face, to be manifestly unreasonable as between themselves and their clients, let alone as costs claimed from the respondents’.
Delivering the lead judgment, Leggatt LJ said: ‘Where both counsel and solicitors have been instructed on a short appeal, the reasonable fees of counsel are likely to exceed the reasonable fees of the solicitor, the main element of the solicitor's work is to instruct counsel and prepare the appeal bundle, and there is usually no reason for the solicitor to spend many hours perusing papers or to work on legal submissions when the legal argument is being handled by counsel.’
The case, Jofa & Anor v Benherst Finance & Anor [2019] EWCA Civ 899, concerned an appeal against a costs order for £23,000. The High Court had ordered Jofa, a small building company, to pay a proportion of Benherst’s costs of applying for a Norwich Pharmacal order requiring the builder to disclose documents. Jofa was successful and costs were summarily assessed.
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