Cutting out the middle man?

In Agassi v Inland Revenue (25/ LL p1) the senior costs judge said that Mr Agassi’s costs in his litigation with the Revenue would have been three times higher if a solicitor had been instructed instead of counsel being instructed direct. Now the Bar Council is claiming that GE Capital Bank v Rushton and Jenking [2005] EWCA Civ 1556 demonstrates that instructing the bar direct was ‘10 times cheaper’ than using solicitors. That case concerned a dispute over a hire purchase agreement, the claimant bank instructing a barrister through solicitors and claiming £68,000 costs of the appeal while the defendants, who instructed their barrister directly, submitted a costs summary of £6,400. It is believed to have been the first case under the public access scheme to reach the Court of Appeal. Anthony Speaight QC, Chairman of the Bar Council’s Access to the Bar Committee, said: ‘The client who acts directly would himself have to undertake some administrative work that a solicitor would do, but this case demonstrates the considerable cost savings that can be achieved.’ According to the Law Society, this one case cannot be used to make any meaningful comparisons and anyone who believes that using barristers is a way to save costs ‘is living in cloud cuckoo land’. In its editorial of 5 January, the Law Society’s Gazette admired Mr Speaight’s ‘barefaced cheek’. Individual cases would always throw up individual results. Another Court of Appeal case on the same day could have produced a costs balance sheet showing a High Court solicitor-advocate to be several times cheaper than his QC and multiple junior counsel opposition. The citing of one potential abnormality illustrated little more than the Bar’s concern over solicitor-advocates and the potential impact of multi-disciplinary partnerships. Indeed, it was likely that the advance of those two phenomena will make the public access scheme redundant!