Lawyers' extras to be cut from bills

SOLICITORS' RATES could be cut by as much as a third as part of a crackdown on lawyers' costs launched by the Lord Chancellor's Department.

The Government proposes to abolish the special "uplift" to a solicitors' bill, which has traditionally been referred to as the "care and conduct" of a case. This includes a percentage mark-up on a bill for what the solicitor considers complications in the case or unforeseen costs. Critics of the system have claimed "care and conduct" has been used to sneak in all kinds of charges.

A spokesman for the Legal Services Ombudsman said anything that increased the transparency of costs was to be welcomed. "We have received a number of complaints about the `care and conduct' part of a bill, which many clients feel should be included in the bill in the first place. It has led to complaints of being ambushed by the final bill," said Simon Entwhistle, the Ombudsman case work manager.

Andrew Ellis, a costs expert who helped to draft the legal costs in the successful Granada TV and Guardian defence of the libel action taken by the former Tory minister Jonathan Aitkin, said that the care and conduct element of a bill could be as much as a third of the total cost.

Mr Ellis said yesterday: "Some jobs are more complicated than others and `care and conduct' reflects this."

Paul Gilbert, who represents 6,000 in-house lawyers in England and Wales, welcomed the move, which he said could well lead to a reduction of a solicitor's bill. "The disappearance of `uplifts' is long overdue. From the clients' point of view, `care and conduct' is difficult to understand. If a job requires expertise then I would expect that to be part of the bill."

He said the legal charging process should be demystified so that a solicitor's bill could be treated like a builder's quote.

The Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Laiarg, also proposes that lawyers be held to the estimates they make when the case is first listed for trial.

Solicitors will be required to provide evidence to the court that they have told the client of the basis on which they propose to charge, as well as their hourly rate. At the listing stage of a case, solicitors will have to set the maximum costs they expect to recover.

David Hartley, head of remuneration at the Law Society, said he was surprised that the Lord Chancellor had set out to abolish the `care and conduct' element of the bill becausemany solicitors had already started charging fixed rates. He added that new procedures to control costs, agreed between the Lord Chancellor and the Law Society, would come into force later this year.

Mr Ellis said some solicitors may now "err on the side of caution" so that the final bills took into account the abolition of "care and conduct".

That, he said, might mean bills actually increased.

The Government's crackdown on costs follows new procedures which came into force last month to streamline cases and reduce the overall expense of going to court. The Woolf reforms offer court users a multi-track option for different kinds of cases.