The leading costs judge in the jurisdiction has called for a review of the electronic bill of costs – but made clear he is not advocating for a return to the paper bill.
Senior Costs Judge Rowley said the electronic bill needs to be looked at again 10 years after it was adopted.
Speaking ahead of the Association of Costs Lawyers Conference in London, Rowley said the current version of the bill, which comes in an Excel spreadsheet and has 55 columns, slows down the assessment process. He described the bill as a ‘wall of information and data that puts people off’.
Rowley said: ‘One might say it’s over-engineered. How can a litigant in person make any sense of that whatsoever? We talk about informed consent in all sorts of areas, which comes from a full and fair exposition of things. For a litigant in person, is this a full and fair exposition of what the other side is claiming? I don’t think so.’
Rowley suggested that some practitioners may be reluctant to admit the electronic bill slows the process because Lord Justice Jackson, in his civil costs review in 2009 which preceded the change, had predicted it would make it faster.
The costs judge said the ‘over-engineered’ nature of the current bill meant there was more to challenge and prevented parties from seeing the bigger picture.
The Senior Courts Costs Office is now working on developing a new format and is looking closely at the Form 5 bill of costs used by the Supreme Court, which Rowley said was ‘disconcertingly simple’.
‘I do not suggest that we go back to paper bills, but there were good bits about paper bills in terms of seeing the wood for the trees,’ he added. ‘We’ve all forgotten how we used to grumble about paper document schedules that went on for 50 pages… we should be going in a different direction. We need an industry solution and then I imagine we can get the rule committee to adopt it if they think that everybody is reasonably happy with it.’
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