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 >> Leigh v Michelin Tyre Plc [2003] EWHC 9048 (Costs) (8 December 2003)
URL: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Costs/2003/9048.html
Cite as: [2003] EWHC 9048 (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 may have an official Neutral Citation issued by the court, and may be available elsewhere on BAILII.

 

 



No.28 of 2003

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Leigh v Michelin Tyre Plc
8 December 2003
Court of Appeal (Lord Phillips MR, Lady Justice Arden, Dyson LJ)

The question which the court addressed in this case was whether a claimant should be bound by the costs estimate included on the allocation questionnaire when the case first came before the court for allocation to the appropriate track, and also to any costs estimate contained in the subsequent listing questionnaire.

Lord Justice Dyson, who delivered the judgment of the court, reviewed the statutory and regulatory provisions as they had evolved, in detail, and emphasised the importance of completion of appropriate figures in the allocation and listing questionnaires and deprecated the practice of many courts in apparently ignoring or failing to insist that the parties did put updated figures in their listing questionnaires.

The court laid down some guidelines for consideration of whether, and to what extent, the figures included in estimates should have an effect on the assessment of the (necessarily much higher) costs ultimately claimed by the successful party.

Firstly they said that the estimates provided by the solicitors of the overall likely costs, should provide a useful yardstick by which the reasonableness of the costs finally claimed could be measured. Thus, if there is a substantial difference between the estimated costs and the claimed costs the difference calls for an explanation, and, in the absence of a satisfactory explanation, the court might conclude that the difference itself is evidence from which it could conclude that the costs claimed were unreasonable.

Secondly, the court may take the estimated costs into account if the other party shows that it relied on the estimate in a certain way, and finally the court may take the estimate into account in cases where it decides that it would probably have given different case management directions if a realistic estimate had been given.

Having given that general guidance the court then turned its attention to the facts of the particular case before it, and concluded their judgment with the following paragraph:

"Despite the persuasive way in which Mr Mansfield puts his case, we are in no doubt that his appeal must be dismissed. We are prepared to accept his submission that the costs estimate was hopelessly inadequate and that there is no satisfactory explanation for the gulf between the estimate and the final figure. But the essence of his argument is that the claimant should be bound by the estimate for no other reason than that the estimate was made and it was hopelessly too low. In other words, the claimant should be penalised as the estimate was seriously inadequate. For the reasons given at paragraphs 26 to 30 above, that is not a sufficient reason to hold that a party should be bound by his estimate."