Mazur has exposed a legal costs system at odds with reality

Mazur, Mazur, Mazur. For many in or around the legal profession it has been the buzzword for 2025, the only topic of discussion, the totem pole around which we all must dance. I say Mazur more than my 10-year-old says '6-7'. Which is, be assured, a lot.

For some law firms it must be like a nightmare from which you never wake up. Remember in August 2025 when all you had to worry about was AML compliance, indemnity insurance, recruitment struggles, economic pressures and the likelihood that AI would destroy us all? They seem like heady days compared with the issues that have arisen since the High Court's September ruling in Mazur.

Putting aside (legitimate) questions about whether regulators could have done better, the crux of the Mazur problem is this: it seeks to put the legal profession back in a world that doesn’t exist anymore.

For years, legislators and regulators stood by (and in some cases encouraged) the profession to develop in a way that was unsustainable in the sort of world that Mazur envisages. How many authorised staff can actually be involved in the process when firms are being forced to work on fixed fees? That is simply not possible.

The profession has evolved to rely on paralegals and legal executives and effectively turned a blind eye to what Mazur now suggests were breaches of the Legal Services Act.

But the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. This is how the profession works now, and unless the courts and clients would be prepared to countenance massive hikes in fees to cover the hourly charges of senior lawyers conducting litigation, then we have an impasse.

Take the High Court’s ruling on costs in Mehmood v Mayor, published last week (after a case heard in April). The reserved judgment does not mention Mazur but it illustrates perfectly how the courts will have to adjust what they regard as reasonable in this new world order.

In Mehmood, the judge was required to consider the question of cost management in a case where fundamental dishonesty was being alleged against the claimant with sums at stake estimated at between £3m and £4m.

Apparently grudgingly, the judge allowed for the claimant to use leading and junior counsel, though he made clear that assistance should be a ‘distinctly junior junior’ barrister. He then states that ‘it seems to me the majority [of solicitor work] ought to be a grade D fee earner rather than a grade A fee earner’.

That is the kicker. The courts (and to be clear, pre-Mazur this was a perfectly reasonable and routine ruling) expect most work to be done by trainee solicitors and paralegals. In other words unauthorised staff working under supervision.

Judges have for many years clamped down on the costs of Grade A fee earners being heavily involved, but now it seems the work cannot be done without them.

Firms are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they insist on using Grade A fee earners to conduct tasks previously given over to unauthorised staff, their costs are deemed unreasonable. If they accede to the court’s wishes and give the majority of work to paralegals, they risk breaching the law and will live in fear of the SRA’s knock on the door. Perhaps someone in government, the judiciary or in legal regulation could explain exactly are they supposed to do?