At whose cost?

It was always known that Callery v Gray would not stem the flow of satellite litigation over costs, but few could have predicted the rapid onslaught as insurers take a series of highly technical challenges to claimant solicitors' conditional fee agreements (CFAs).

Forget The Accident Group case - there are issues of substance there - but should a CFA not be valid because the solicitor, who must declare any interest in the accompanying insurance policy, fails to make clear that he has none? Was that the mischief Parliament intended to stamp out?

Regulations are regulations, and if they are not clear enough the government is to blame.

But some suggest that the insurance industry is suddenly going out of its way to make these kinds of challenges, an attitude which is apparently not going down a storm at the Court of Appeal, where all these cases will eventually land.

The conspiracy theorists say this is all about the insurers putting pressure on claimant lawyers to accept fixed fees (or 'predictable costs' as they are now called).

But as the initial results of the Law Society consultation on fixed fees show, there is a long way to go before solicitors will do this.

The Civil Justice Council has its 'big tent' where these issues are, slowly, being thrashed out.

Jaw-jaw has to be better than war-war, but if it's a case of the bigger the tent, the more hot air, then the government and judiciary will have to step in.