If costs management is judged to trump detailed assessment, then the rush to fixed costs could be stopped, says Francis Kendall
Lord Justice Jackson is busy revisiting old haunts from 2010 to gather the views of practitioners and others from across England and Wales about the extension of fixed recoverable costs (FRCs) that he has been charged with examining.
He openly came to the task with a view in favour of the wider application of FRCs in “lower-value” cases, but in his keynote address to a costs conference in early March, observed that the written and oral submissions received to date delivered a “strong message” that “despite all the criticisms in the past, costs management is now working much better”.
Sir Rupert reported: “It applies the new proportionality rule to the circumstances of each individual case. Many people are arguing that this does away with the need for fixed costs in the multi-track. The counter-argument is that for lower-value cases, a fixed-costs regime is simpler
