Congratulations! After much hard work over a long period of time, you have at last achieved a successful result for your client and obtained an order for detailed assessment of your costs.
Although the litigation is complete, however, the arduous process of costs recovery is just beginning, and as bitter experience tells you it is often many months, if not years, between the settlement of the case and the recovery of your costs. Typically this will involve passing your file to a Costs Lawyer or draftsperson to prepare a Bill of Costs. Often, the costs firm/department will have a backlog of work and it may be a number of weeks, or even months, before the Bill is prepared and served. Then your opponent has at least 21 days (often extended by agreement) to serve Points of Dispute, following which your draftsman has an extendable minimum of 21 days to prepare Replies.
Sadly, despite the exchange of costs pleadings, settlement of the costs claim can remain a distant dream. It can seem to take an age for offers to be considered and the paying party’s own offers are frequently pitched at an unreasonably low level. Detailed assessment may ultimately be required, but it will be a number of months between requesting a hearing and the detailed assessment actually taking place.
It is an unfortunate fact that obtaining payments on account of costs is at best a secondary consideration for many costs professionals. They typically work to targets based upon how quickly they can prepare Bills of Costs, and so focus on what they consider to be their bread and butter. Too frequently, a laissez faire attitude is adopted towards interim payments and your hope of receiving payment in a timely fashion is left to the whim of the paying party – often ponderous bureaucracies such as NHS Resolution or the Government Legal Department.
With a quality costs service, however, you should be receiving a substantial costs payment at the conclusion of the main action, in practically every case. If you are not, something is going wrong.
If any of the above sounds familiar, I can implement procedures that ensure that payments on account of costs are received at the beginning of the costs process. In most cases, it should not be necessary to wait until a detailed assessment is requested to apply for an interim payment.
Contact me to find out more about how I can assist you in the timely and efficient recovery of your costs.
