Tweet I have posted before about what needs to be pleaded in a modern suit for fees: see this post and the posts linked to within it.  Today I have come across a decision in which the failure to plead that which many people think need not be pleaded resulted in a semi-successful application to [...]

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Tweet What follows are my rambling first thoughts about value pricing, penned without having read any of the leading treatises on the question, and without having read any sophisticated value pricing-based retainers.  I am most willing to be shown the nuances and possibilities overlooked in my preliminary explorations.  I am not wedded to any of [...]

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Tweet In Legal Profession Complaints Committee v PJO’H [2011] WASAT 95 (S), delivered on 20 February 2012 and not yet on Austlii, the Tribunal helpfully reviewed the penalties awarded in the gross overcharging cases over the years before suspending the respondent from practice for 6 months (the Committee wanted 18).  Two other things are notable [...]

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Tweet I have always been a bit dubious about the proposition to be found in the texts that in the absence of specification one way or the other, a multiple retainer is presumed to be a several retainer (so that the clients are severally responsible for their fair share of the costs) rather than a [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet For a long time after the new national profession legislation is introduced, if it is introduced in its present form, many lawyers are likely to find themselves restricted to charging scale, and not being able to recover their costs until there has been a taxation in the Costs Court, even when they have negotiated [...]

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Tweet I’m giving a seminar on Wednesday: see http://bit.ly/npDJVY.  I’m talking about Misconduct and Costs. The Supreme Court of Victoria’s Costs Judge, Associate Justice Jamie Wood, is talking about best practice in taxations of costs, and Liz Harris, the founder of Harris Costs Lawyers, is talking about costs agreements and risk management.  I think it’s [...]

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Tweet Legal Services Board v DF [2011] VSC 292 will be of considerable interest to those who draft and work within no-win no-fee retainers. Justice Karin Emerton found that though Victoria’s repealed Legal Practice Act, 1996 implicitly prohibited the charging of uplift fees otherwise than upon a ‘successful outcome’  it was open to parties to [...]

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Tweet For some reason I have agreed to give a seminar on the ethics of billing by the hour, one of those topics so big that I have until now avoided tinkering around the edges of it.  My distinguished collaborators, who will give separate papers at the 7 September 2011 seminar in Melbourne, will be [...]

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Tweet The Court of Appeal has had the opportunity promptly to provide a decision illustrating the limits of its previous decision in Kuek v Devflan Pty Ltd [2011] VSCA 25, which I posted about here.  The opportunity arose in Shaw v Yarranova Pty Ltd [2011] VSCA 55, a unanimous decision of Justices of Appeal Redlich [...]

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