Duties in relation to costs of solicitors acting for deceased estates

Ireland as Executor of the Estate of the Gordon v Retallack [2011] NSWSC 1096 is a decision by a trial judge disallowing certain of the plaintiff’s solicitors’ costs as between solicitor and client on the basis that they were unnecessarily incurred.  Justice Pembroke exercised power under the Civil Procedure Act, 1995 (NSW) and the Court’s inherent jurisdiction where:

’13.  There was no need for expert evidence to resolve any legitimate question of construction arising out of Clauses 4, 5 and 16 of the will. There appeared to be a misapprehension that the resolution of the questions of construction would be assisted by evidence of the various commercial methodologies that might be utilised to achieve the testator’s objective. This was simply woolly thinking. On several occasions, senior counsel for the first defendant submitted, with admirable restraint, that the case could and should have been conducted on one document, namely the will. He was right of course. That would have been the conventional approach. Instead, I was presented with a plethora of highly complex and unnecessary accounting and taxation evidence. In addition, a great deal of irrelevant factual evidence was adduced – for no purpose and to no avail.’

His Honour made the following observations in relation to the obligations of solicitors acting for executors of deceased estates: Continue reading “Duties in relation to costs of solicitors acting for deceased estates”

Solicitors’ exposure to falling between two stools in solicitor-client taxations revealed

Update, 16.2.12: See now Ipex ITG Pty Ltd v McGarvie [2011] VSC 675.

Original post: A recent decision of the Supreme Court’s Costs Court means that solicitors have only a non-extendable 60 days in which to seek taxation of counsel’s fees, even though clients and third party payers have an extendable 12 months in which to seek taxation of the solicitors’ fees, including disbursements such as counsel’s fees: Kong v Henty Jepson & Kelly Pty Ltd, unreported, Associate Justice Wood, 4 April 2011.  The same result was reached in I.J.R. Homes v MDM Legal Services SCI, unreported, Associate Justice Wood, 12 September 2011, and the Costs Judge’s comments in that order are reproduced at the end of this post too.  Unless the barrister may be joined to and bound as against the solicitor to the outcome of the taxation of the solicitors’ fees initiated after the expiry of the time allowed to the solicitor for seeking taxation of the counsel’s fees, the solicitors run the risk of the client being liable to them only for the taxed down amount of counsel’s fees while the solicitors remain liable to the barrister for the full whack.

And the solicitor cannot get around the problem by seeking to procure their client to seek taxation of the counsel’s fees directly against counsel, because, the Supreme Court says, clients have no standing to do so.  Though the Court has a discretion under s. 3.4.42 to join ‘concerned law practices’ and order that they be bound by the outcome, it did not make such orders in the Kong Case joining the barrister, though for reasons peculiar to that case, the Court’s reluctance to do so may not be as great in future. All of that applies where the traditional relations between client, solicitor and counsel are entered into; where the client has a costs agreement with the barrister, things are different, and less problematic for solicitors.

But for the fact that solicitors tend to disregard the law of costs and carry on as they always have, no matter what the law is and how it is changed, four reactions might be expected in Victoria and the many other states with analogous statutory provisions:

1.   Solicitors will commence prophylactic applications for taxation of counsel’s fees within 60 days after service on them of the fee slip, in case the client later seeks to tax the solicitors’ bills (but they may well have to pay the costs of doing so out of their own pockets);

2.  Solicitors will require counsel to contract directly with clients in relation to fees, which many counsel will not be prepared to do;

3.  Solicitors might seek to contract out of clients’ rights to review counsel’s fees as disbursements on their bills, or to contract out of their rights to review counsel’s fees as disbursements on their bills, once their right to seek review of counsel’s fees has expired, but that is likely to be effective only where the clients and third party payers are ‘sophisticated’ within the s. 3.4.2 meaning of that term, since agreements about costs which purport to contract out of normal (as opposed to ‘sophisticated’) clients’ and/or third party payers’ rights to taxation are void: see ss. 3.4.26(5) and 3.4.31; or

4.  Solicitors might make it a term of their costs agreement with counsel that counsel indemnify the solicitors against any difference between the amount paid by the solicitors to the barrister and the amount payable by the client to the solicitors in respect of those same fees, but any such agreement would have to have a degree of sophistication, to avoid counsel taking the rap for a solicitor’s default (such as where counsel provide adequate information for the solicitor to provide disclosure of counsel’s fees to the client, but the solicitor fails to do so, with the result that the solicitor’s taxed costs, including disbursements such as counsel’s fees, are reduced under s. 3.4.17(4).

How are similar problems treated in other states’ and territories’ taxing and review jurisdictions?

Continue reading “Solicitors’ exposure to falling between two stools in solicitor-client taxations revealed”