Tony Walton charts the milestones on the road to fixing fees
Ten short years ago, the Civil Procedure Rules introduced “proportionality” into the relationship between damages and costs. The hourly rate though, continued to rule largely unabated; the perversity that the longer the lawyer took to complete a claim, the more he got paid, remained.
But then the Fixed Recoverable Costs Scheme (“predictable costs”) followed. Something of a quiet revolution, it introduced fixed fees into motor claims settling up to £10,000 outside proceedings—the vast majority of such claims. It’s a revolution which has succeeded in deposing the hourly rate from the majority of those claims.
If all goes to plan, the next stage of the revolution begins next April. Assuming the Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ’s) recently published recommendations for costs in road traffic accidents (RTAs) are implemented, a new regime of much reduced staged fees will apply to the same category of claims-injuries worth up to £10,000 arising from RTAs settling before issue of proceedings.
Innovation
The MoJ proposals are innovative in procedure as well:
