40 hours? 8 hours per day during the working week. To read 30 pages. Surely professional sanction is appropriate here? What is the SRA going to do about this? What does the Law Society say about this?

When you scratch off the veneer of any City firm you'll find a bunch of spivs on the make. Is there still an unofficial competition among City lawyers as to who can achieve the most outlandish effective hourly rate without challenge from their client? Poor NRF - a guaranteed podium finish cruelly snatched away.

4 witness statements, therefore 120 pages. 40 hours isn't that excessive for that in itself given the relevance and importance of them, however 235 hours plus 40 hours is.

NRF are lucky to get away with a slap on the wrist. I would have thought daylight robbery would undermine the trust of the public (leaving aside the glaring lack of integrity).

This happens far too often. Big firms quote low hourly rates to attract work. The fee earner spends 3 x the amount of time and triples the hourly rate. Also there is so much duplication that increase the bill of costs. I have seen over a similar hours spent on drafting a witness statement of the same amount (that's strange as I thought that witnesses should draft in their own words as possible) and then 40 hours reviewing it's own homework and then sending to counsel to have another draft/review.

@anonymous user 10:32
"undermine the trust of the public" Haha, good one. The public have no trust in lawyers, especially city lawyers!

Far far too much time spent on this, totally disproportionate.

Thanks for explaining, Lydia. Would totally have missed that if you hadn't pointed it out.

Clearly, I am going to be in a minority on this, but I have a good deal of scepticism for the cost budgeting mechanism under the CPR generally. Not commenting on the specifics of this particular case, as I don't know the facts, but making a general observation.

First controversial proposition - trial judges aren't actually particularly well equipped to assess reasonableness of cost budgets. Most trial judges have never practiced as solicitors. The few that have done will likely have run their last major case some decades ago. How many judges have actually in their career gone through the process of taking a proof of evidence and turning it into a witness statement? How many judges have coordinated an e-discovery exercise? How many judges have dealt first hand with all the tedious quasi-logistical work that goes into preparing for trial (I have no doubt most of them appeared in multiple trials as leading counsel, but I'm talking the grubby behind the scenes work that has to be churned through)?

Just taking witness statements as an example, the work necessary to prepare a witness statement cannot always be reliably gauged by the number of pages the eventual document runs to. An awful lot depends on the complexity of subject matter, the volume of underlying documents, and the quality of the witness itself. A good witness will more or less write his own statement. A difficult witness will obviously still end up with a statement that is in his own words but he might require an awful lot of work to help elicit the story from him. I have worked with witnesses whose 20-30 page statements took me 10 hours, and I have also worked with witnesses where witness statements of similar length ended up costing closer to 40 or 50 hours of my time. Whether the witness turns out to be easy or difficult, you don't just turn up and have a nice chat with the witness and then bang out a note of what he said which is immediately good enough to be signed. Many hours are often required just to prepare for the first interview - reading the primary documents, identifying areas where evidence will be relevant to issues in dispute, drafting the interview questionnaire, putting together the interview document pack for the witness to cross-refer during the interview. Before you even speak to a witness for the first time you might already have spent well over 10 hours on his witness statement. Then comes the first interview. Then comes the first draft, and personally I've never had a first draft that didn't have further questions in it in square brackets. Then comes the second interview. And so on until you are done. So, to look at a witness statement and say "ah well, this is 30 pages, so it shouldn't have taken you more than X hours" is highly arbitrary. In the absence of a fairly detailed account of what work went into the finished product, a judge is in a very poor position to assess whether a particular amount of time spent on a statement is reasonable simply by reference to the number of pages it spans. That detailed account, however, is not available to the judge in the context of a budget estimate exercise. It would have been available to a costs assessor on a detailed cost assessment, but not to the trial judge in the context of a budgeting exercise - the process just isn't set up for this.

This brings me to my second controversial proposition - the budget estimate process is doomed to failure from the start because nobody is prepared to allow for costs necessary to prepare a proper estimate. Estimating costs of substantive litigation is a fool's errand at best of times. But the whole process is undermined from the start, because everyone knows that the court will not allow a party to recover the sort of costs that are required in order to produce a proper estimate. To have the best shot at an accurate cost estimate, the exercise requires material partner and senior associate involvement. We are talking an exercise that attempts to look months if not years into the future and anticipate multiple possible scenarios while taking into account multiple variables and unknowns. Outside of litigation, no commercial entity would expect to complete such a modelling exercise in a couple of hours and without input of senior management. But just try and claim more than a few thousand pounds as costs of preparing a cost budget.

The sentiment and policy behind the cost budgeting regime is without doubt a laudable one. But I think the regime needs considerable refinement. I'd say it should have no place in big ticket litigation between parties who can easily afford each other's fees. In that setting, the process is nothing more than an extra layer of cost and a playground for all sorts of tactical manoeuvring.

I think what Lydia meant to say was "In my opinion there was far too much time recorded by NRF on this matter: one might say that it was totally disproportionate to the issues."

Sorry to jump in here but otherwise people might find it difficult to understand her point.

The litigator's term for this practice is 'billing the arse of a file'. Why send a trainee to sit behind counsel at a CMC when a partner can also attend with a senior associate? The more the merrier. The trainee can carry the bundles. The associate can look to make an interesting point and give cold hard stares to his opposite number and the partner can chat to the barrister about the rugby and life in general. The client pays so happy days.

superb post from anonymous user at 8.56 on the 3rd June.

I had to laugh at the implication by another poster that the witness themselves would have done most of the work in preparing it. Getting a witness of fact to write their own statement is like asking us to give a seminar about astrophysics - a few lines of generalist third hand gossip combined with hopeful speculation is as good as it will get.