Jackson reforms

The government is to abolish the recoverability of success fees in defamation cases – but retain it for after-the-event insurance premiums, it announced yesterday.

Proportionality should be addressed at the beginning of an assessment, and not the end, because it should inform the reasonableness of the costs, a costs judge has suggested.

A claimant who submitted a budget that did not include figures for trial preparation or trial has won relief from a decision that limited the entire budget to court fees only – but only for those parts of the budget that were completed.

It is “unacceptable” that there is still no guidance on the proportionality test more than five years after it came into force, a leading costs silk has argued. Nick Bacon QC was speaking following the latest application of the test, which saw a circuit judge reduce assessed costs of £116,000 to £75,000.

An unsuccessful defendant in a road traffic claim for financial losses who made an unsuccessful counterclaim for personal injury was entitled to the protection of qualified one-way costs shifting for the whole case, a circuit judge has ruled.

Many solicitors and judges were not ready for the electronic bill of costs when it became compulsory in April and few are keen on it now, according to a survey by the Association of Costs Lawyers. There are, however, small signs that solicitors are getting better at budgeting.

A circuit judge was wrong to order that qualified one-way costs shifting automatically applied to a claim about misuse of data because it also included a personal injury element, the High Court has ruled. Mrs Justice Whipple said the court has complete discretion as to what action to take.

The rules on qualified one-way costs shifting do not prevent a successful defendant in a multi-defendant claim recovering costs from the damages awarded against a different defendant, the Court of Appeal has ruled. However, it held that this right could not be enforced where the damages were payable under a Tomlin order.