A billionaire Georgian businessman has been granted the right to have legal bills worth £12.8m assessed after a court ruled that they were not final.

Bidzina Ivanishvili had issued proceedings seeking a declaration that the 79 invoices rendered by commercial firm Signature Litigation over more than six years were not ‘statutory bills’.

The bills had all been paid but the former client submitted to the court that they could still be assessed. That was because the contract of retainer between the parties incorporated a conditional fee agreement and those invoices represented only a part of the fees that might become due to the firm for the work undertaken.

The firm argued that the invoices rendered were, at the time of delivery, complete and final bills. In effect, only the last bill, dated October 2022, could be open to assessment, but otherwise they were all paid and the claimant had no right to challenge them.

In Ivanishvili v Signature Litigation LLP, Costs Judge Leonard found that none of the invoices issued over the six-year period were statutory bills.

There is no basis for inferring any agreement that the monthly invoices were statutory bills, 'because any such agreement would have been inconsistent with the terms of the retainer under which they were rendered and paid', said Leonard.

Under the retainer the parties had signed, Leonard said the invoices could be finalised only when either the firm delivered a bill for any additional fees due (the uplift fee or success fee, for example) or the firm accepted that nothing more was due, and finalised its billing on that basis.

As it was, there was no basis for arguing that the termination of the retainer in 2022 had made all previous bills final.

‘The default position for a contract between a solicitor and the client who retains that solicitor is that it is an “entire contract”,’ said Leonard. ‘In consequence the solicitor is entitled to render a statutory bill only at the end of the retainer, as on the completion of a transaction or the conclusion of litigation.’

 

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