My practice recently submitted a bill to the Principal Registry for assessment.

The case was publicly funded.

For those of you who have forgotten what is involved in this procedure, my practice employs a costs draftsman at a fee to prepare the strange document that the rules require.

That is then processed through my office with staff paid for that exercise, submitted to the High Court, when another fee is paid to the High Court office.

A civil servant in that office, who is paid a civil service salary and acquires no doubt impressive pensions rights, then looks through the bill against the file.

That bill is then returned to us when any changes involve the complicated process of rescheduling the figures on to a form of certificate, which is resubmitted to the court with an additional fee and then checked yet again by a civil servant.

When the fees have been certificated by the court, the document is sent back to my office and we then have to send it to the Legal Services Commission, which similarly employs somebody to check through the paperwork before condescending to confirm that my firm may possibly be paid a month or two later.

To find this procedure is applied in circumstances where, on a bill claiming a total of 5,510.62, the court has allowed 5,500.62, a deduction of just 10, stands no comparison to the complete waste of time and money in such a long, extended and poorly operated assessment procedure.

I would welcome a response from the Law Society on what hope there is within the next 100 years of streamlining such an ineffective and wasteful procedure.

John Stebbing, Stephen Rimmer & Co, Eastbourne, East Sussex