England and Wales High Court (Senior Courts Costs Office) Decisions

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You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> England and Wales High Court (Senior Courts Costs Office) Decisions >> Higgs v Camden & Islington Health Authority [2003] EWHC 9021 (Costs) (16 January 2003)
URL: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Costs/2003/9021.html
Cite as: [2003] EWHC 9021 (Costs)

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This summary of a judgment has been obtained from the Supreme Court Costs Office pages on the HM Courts Service web site. The citation used by BAILII is not an officially approved citation. The full text of the judgment is at [2003] EWHC 15 (QB).

 

 

No.1 of 2003

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Higgs v Camden & Islington Health Authority
16 January 2003
Mr Justice Fulford (Sitting With Assessors)

This was a major clinical negligence case run by Messrs Leigh Day & Co the claimant having developed cerebral palsy as a result of medical negligence surrounding his birth. The case was settled very shortly before trial for £3.5 million plus some capped future educational costs. The claim might have been worth over £6.4 million if an inconvenient decision on recovery of damages could have been overturned.

The Costs Judge who assessed the claimants solicitors bill allowed a rate of £300 per hour for Ms W, a senior partner in Messrs Leigh Day & Co, and an hourly rate of £350 for Leading Counsel for the claimant, Lord Brennan.

The appeal starts by pointing out that in such a situation an Appeal Court should be slow to interfere with the decision of a specialist Costs Judge, citing Mealing-McLeod v The Common Professional Examination Board [2000] 2 Costs LR 223, provided the Costs Judge had correctly applied the appropriate principles.

In a very full and exhaustive judgment the Judge rehearsed the arguments that were put before him, and upheld the Costs Judge on both points. So far as the hourly rate for the solicitors were concerned he accepted that it was at the top of the range for work done in 1999 to 2001, but concluded that the Costs Judge had correctly applied the proper principles and used his own experience in approving the figure. The Judge also held that it was not wrong for him to use the old A plus B calculation as a check to see whether the global figure claimed was appropriate.

On the question of counsel’s hourly rate it was conceded that Lord Brennan was one of the foremost practitioners in the clinical negligence field, and as such could command a very high hourly rate, which again was justified on the facts and bearing in mind the complex points of law involved in this case.

The Judge did however conclude his judgment with the following paragraph:

"This judgment should not be read as indicating that an hourly rate of £300 for partners or £350 for leading counsel are in any sense "the norm". My conclusions are based purely on the particular factors that exceptionally resulted in those figures being appropriate in this heavy and difficult case. This was a complex, very high value clinical negligence claim involving an unusually intensive level of input from solicitors and counsel even for this category of injury."