I have recently won a case were the solicitors were negligent and didnt know what form to fill or what they were claiming for.

I was awarded costs, but they are no disputing the amount.

Am I or was I misled into beliving that I could claim upto 2/3rds od a solicitors rate?

I was told today that the most I will recieve is £9.00.

This is a farce and a mockery. I have documents that the errant solicitor wanted me to pay, on demand, if they won in court for over £10,000.

I have spent 3 years fighting this fool and his clients only to find that "I,m Damned if I win, and damned if I loose"

If I lost I had to pay £220 per hour for him and all the expences he was claiming,like photo copying letters, painting and decorating, holidays, another home somewere a duckpond that needed filling, and a third car for his wife etc etc, and I can only claim the 2/3rds rule if as was described to me if I was a banker on £120 million a year and I had defended myself. Why would I want to do that?

I couldnt afford the £30k asked for by other rippof solicitors, so had to do it myself.

Is this right or I,m I haveing my leg pulled by another wobbly handshaker?

Hi lop

Welcome to CAG

The guys will be happy to advise as soon as they are available.

Thread moved.

Thanks for the reply but were have you moved my new thread to?

lopez, dont worry where the thread has been moved to.. you have obviously found it as you posted. But.. for your information, as it is a legal question.. you have been rehomed in the legal issues section.

righto... your question.

Just because you can claim up to 2/3rds of what a solicitor would claim does not mean that you can actually put in a claim for 2/3rds of what their bill of costs was/is.

You need to itemise your hours.. @ £9.25 per hour this for researching / preparing paperwork/

Then any travel expenses/loss of earnings/petrol/parking fees.

Postage/paper/scanning/photocopying/printing.

HTH

If you want to pop up what you are attempting to claim for, then we can go through it for you.

Hi and thanks. I was worried I,d lost the thread.

But I,m focused now.

The things I am claiming for are all the hours that I have spent acting as a solicitors clerk. I have had to to do all the work that a solicitor would have done that I simply couldnt aford.

I have had to follow and work with a Pro Bono Barrister for 10mths and do all the typing and printing. and paginating 10 case files, yes 10, dont ask.(he only gave advise) I had to apear in court and have the pi*s taken by rude judges who knew nothing of the law and abused me when I protested.

The negligent solicitor tried and failed to blam someone else, He refused to reply to any letters or emails sent by the Pro Bono Barrister, and is now expecting me to accept a few hundred pounds.

At the correct amount (2/3rds of a solicitors rate) my bill with disbesments and costs amount to £25.000.00 I was asked for 30,000.00 to defend myself, which I simply dont have. But the judge today said that if I was a banker and on 150k and defended my self he would have had to make a payment upto 2/3rds (ie say £160.per hour) what he seem to be devoid of is, common sence and that if I was a banker I wouldnt need to defend myself. Fools.

Hi! Yup I've been there, know what you've been through. Not being nosey but if you proved your solicitor to be negligent were you awarded damages? I settled a claim for negligence against my solicitor after the first day of the hearing, out of court, so costs didn't come into it. I hope that you have been paid damages. TAG

terriersaregreat.

I think you missed a bit of the thread M8.

I was unrepresented, like I didnt have a solicitor.

The people,s who tried to sue me, had a negligent solicitor.

He didnt use the correct legal forms to start a case and didnt tell us what breaches his clients claimed we had breached.

Therefore we couldnt defend anything as we didnt know what we,d done wrong..

I was also intereste din knowing if I could ask for a wasted costs order as I think there is a provision for damages in it.

Subsequent judges told us to shut up or they would throw us out of court, and a circuit judge called hughes who lurches around the winchester are, was paid to look at our appeal and didnt even look at the paperwork. It was sumarilly dismissed.

Then we got Pro Bono who advised correctly that we were in facy right all along and set out on his expencive note paper the grounds for the appeal, which was exactly the same as mine, but on expensive headings and from a very, very expensive chanbers in London.

But I had all the legwork and typing and paper and printing and fone calls and everthing that goes with a long and expensive court case.

But I,m expected to do it for free.

Sorry, got ya now. So basically you need to receive your costs for trying to defend an action when you didn't know what you are defending?

I'm sorry but you were never going to get £25k in costs as a LiP. Nothing wrong with going in high though and negotiating down so long as you don't over inflate your claim.

You have to be reasonable and a few grand costs would be more likely than £25k.

I agree with Ganymede. I was a litigant in person too but counterclaiming because I was arguing that the fees that I was taken to court for were not payable because I had received negligence advice.

Not sure where you stand with someone taking you to court without saying what they are taking you to court for. Was the claim struck out?

Who told you that you would only receive £9.00 and when and where were you told this, your posts are not very clear. You have to remember that we have no idea what has happened to you.

I can and do sympathise as I have been treated very badly by various (district judges, and circuit)I have also come across some very fair judges.

Have you submitted a detailed bill of your costs?

Just thinking this over - when you received the Order what did it actually say about the costs? e.g. did it give any timescales?

 

Who told you that you would only receive £9.00 and when and where were you told this, your posts are not very clear.

 

Have you submitted a detailed bill of your costs?

Could it be that when costs were applied for lopez asked for 2/3 solicitors costs per hour and not the LIP £9.25? It is always the disbursements where a LiP can make up 'some ' of the short fall.

Hi Lopez

Was a costs order made at the hearing or have you been directed to file/ file & serve within a given number of days post judgement?

If its the latter then CB is pointing you in the right direction, you need to itemise your time, overheads [fixed costs for postage, printing, fuel, travel, telephone etc........ the list is endless] and put together a spreadsheet. As an Lip you 'should' be allowed i.r.o £9.25 per hour, 20p per mile, 11p per copy doc etc etc ..... Keep it factual, the other side are allowed to test the verasity of your claim. However, I'm sure if this has been in litigation for 3 years there will be many, many hours of research and time you would be within the rules to apply.

Gez

Hi there. I was recently involved in a case against my landlord/freeholder, this was allocated to the fast track so I would of been able to claim costs, the defendant has since agreed to settle out of court, but I had started to prepare my costs, these would of been approx 200 hours, which equals only £1850, I could add some disbursements and court fees but that would only bring it to just over £2000. To get £25k you would of had to do over 2000 hours work.

The 2/3 rate is an absolute maximum, you cant just go in and say well, a solicitor would charge £x so i'll charge 2/3 of £x, you have to list the hours and it has to be reasonable.

Of course being a LiP you come to the situation knowing very little so you can, justifyibly in my view, spend ,many hours on research while a solicitor/barrister should already know the law.

Andy

The case was withdrawn after a Probono barrister became involved.

Cost were awarded on a "If not agreed basis".

The errant solicitor, who was a ** edited out identifiers ** ,Swindon. Was so bad he caused me to have a stress related heart attack, (three days in hospital, several more later for checks) He was warned, and told by a circuit judge that the action should stop. But because of the costs implication he refused.

There seems to be an anomally here. Under what circumstances would someone get the 2/3rds of a solicitors rate?

Surely it cant be a reserve for the rich on 200K because they wouldnt have been defending themselves. They would have sent Luigi and the boys around to sort out the problem. Which now sounds like it would have been the cheaper option and less stressfull, atleast for me.

Why is the 2/3rds rule even there for if no-one can get it?

Does anyone know of anyone getting it?

The documents below might help make things clearer.

[ATTACH]29508[/ATTACH]

[ATTACH]29506[/ATTACH]

It's not much help but report such a ------ to the Solicitors Reguoulation Authority. It really is awful that a CJ tells him to stop and doesn't order him to stop.If it had been you who had brought the claim as a LIP you'd have been wiped out.

So getting back to the case........it was withdrawn and you didn't really have your day in court!

I'd issue him with a detailed bill as suggested in a couple of posts, making sure that you take everything into account that you are able to be paid for. Now the thing is I think the bill would have to be paid by the Claimant and they'd have to pay. They would then get it back from their solicitor who was negligent.

Think that's the way to go but otherss might disagree.

I hope that you are as well as can be expected. Try not to let these probs get you down the stress will not be good for you.TAG

The case was withdrawn after a Probono barrister became involved.

 

Cost were awarded on a "If not agreed basis".

 

The errant solicitor, who was a ** edited out identifiers ** ,Swindon. Was so bad he caused me to have a stress related heart attack, (three days in hospital, several more later for checks) He was warned, and told by a circuit judge that the action should stop. But because of the costs implication he refused.

 

There seems to be an anomally here. Under what circumstances would someone get the 2/3rds of a solicitors rate?

 

Surely it cant be a reserve for the rich on 200K because they wouldnt have been defending themselves. They would have sent Luigi and the boys around to sort out the problem. Which now sounds like it would have been the cheaper option and less stressfull, atleast for me.

 

Why is the 2/3rds rule even there for if no-one can get it?

 

Does anyone know of anyone getting it?

My understanding is that the 2/3 rule is not a 'rate' but the absolute maximum total, you still charge at the LiP rate of £9.25.

For example, a solicitor has told you he would charge £200 per hour and your case would involve 50 hours work therefore the total would be £10000, however you represent yourself, and do a lot of reasearch (as you dont know the law, unlike a solicitor), so lets say you do four times as much reaserach/work as a solicitor would, lets say 200 hours, that would equal £1850, you could claim for more hours if you genuinely did it but the maximum you could claim would be 2/3's of £10000 which equals £6667.

I'm unaware of what you earn has any bearing on it except if you are low paid/out of work you could get exemptiuon for court fees and it is also possible to get Legal Services Commission funding (this means that the other side CANNOT claim costs even if the case is on fast/multi track).

Im not sure how/if you can claim for hours of missed work at a fast/multi track, on the small track you can claim your hourly rate for missed work but only upto a maximum of £50.

Andy

Andy

Thanks for the reply all of you.

I cant complain to the SRA they are a bunch of tozzers anyway. They only look at the way YOUR solicitor acts and their not interested in how the oposion,s solicitor acted, I have spoken to them about it.

I have presented an itemised bill, he rejected it and when I rang his office to find out what was wrong with the bill in the format I had writen it, he laughed down the phone and hung up.

I went to see the court and he sent a letter saying it was a waste of time him comming so he wasnt coming.

the Judge said the way it was presented was OK by him, he understood it and it was aceptable. He gave him 7 days to reply or else. He replied with the usuall about you can only get £9.20 and we were all back in court on Friday. I let ripp and told both him and the Judge that I wasnt acepting any £9.00 because if I,d lost I was expected to cough up £10 grand, If I won I get a few hundred. NO WAY.

I am now going to write a personal letter to the Judge pointing out the errors of his ways and rely on the case history kindly given by CitizenB above.

I knew I,d seen it somewere but didnt want to spend the next fortnight looking for it as aparently I dont get paid for research:)

The stress is getting to me as my BP is now having to be controled with flippin drugs again. I may have to take her in doors out for some retail therapy:)

The reason the bill was so high is because there were three of us being sued, that means three of everthing as we each represented our selves. Only one was eligibale for the Probono barister, who was excellent, but his services stoped as soon as the case was lost by the otherside.

Would we also be eligable to bring a case for a "wasted costs order" as I,m not feeling very benevolent towards this nasty negligent solicitor from SWINDON.

I'm afraid the realities of the court system is that solicitors and barristers are allowed to charge out there hours in costs whilst LiP's are not.. perhaps you could post up your itemised bill and we can see where the issues may be.

Fact is if you simply put down a list of items to work up to the 2/3 of the costs claimed by the opposing side then it will fail I feel. You have to be seen to be reasonable. If you and the other side cant decide on the costs you can apply for the judge to decide them but he WILL seek clarification and even justification of the amounts claimed. You cannot just make up numbers it has to be real and evidenced imho.

S.

Thanks for the reply Shadow.

so how does your comment compare with CitizeB,s attachment above?

Thanks for the reply Shadow.

 

so how does your comment compare with CitizeB,s attachment above?

In what way?

S.

Well if you read it you can see that he was awarded 2/3rds plus disbursments.

I have tried to open and post it but I need a few more post yet:)

Ahhh right ok.

Well firstly the costs section of CPR are guidelines... I'm sure you've heard the saying Judges are a law onto themselves

However that said... EACH and EVERY case is decided on its merits.. in the case posted above it was a claim which had numerous hearings and was complex... the judge decided that the number of hours claimed @ the litigant in person rate would take him above the 2/3 limit. This appears to have been backed up with evidence.

As I said in my post you cannot just claim 2/3 of the amount without evidenced justification, I did ask for you to post up your itemised schedule so we can give an opinion otherwise I'm just going on what you have typed and nothing more.

S.

I dont seem able to post the list of costs.

It wont let me cut and paste