The court determined that the amounts were "manifestly excessive"
The UK High Court has cut the litigation budgets related to the case brought by Prince Harry and others against Mail publisher Associated Newspapers Limited, reported the Law Society Gazette.
Overall, the claimants’ budgets hit £18,744,761.72 while the defendants’ budget reached £19,850,282.40. The court slashed the claimants’ budget to £4,084,000 and the defendants’ budget to £4,445,000. Costs were reduced in statements of case, disclosure, witness statements, case management conferences, pre-trial review, trial preparation, the trial, and alternative dispute resolution.
In a written judgment, Senior Master Jeremy David Cook noted that the proposed budget of the parties in Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon OBE & Ors v Associated Newspapers Limited was “just over £38.8m.” Cook and High Court judge Sir Matthew James Nicklin FRSA agreed that “such sums were manifestly excessive and therefore disproportionate,” as per a statement published by the Gazette.
Cook said that the amounts “were presented as contingencies”; moreover, the hourly rates of the defendant’s solicitors were “well outside the prevailing guideline rates.” In addition, there was “considerable overlap between each of the claimants’ pleaded cases where the three claimant firms of solicitors were instructing the same counsel team.”
“The defendant’s solicitors’ hourly rates, claimed at £740 per hour for a grade A fee earner, are high. The claimants’ budgets contain a large amount of duplication between the solicitor and counsel team. We have also taken into account that both sides will incur electronic hosting costs but not at the rate they anticipate,” Nicklin said in a statement published by the Gazette.
The judgment also noted that inadequate allowance was made for the fact that members of the legal teams had been involved in litigation related to Mirror publisher MGN Limited and The Sun publisher News Group Newspapers Limited.
“The claimants’ respective legal teams therefore had acquired considerable expertise in this type of litigation and were not starting from scratch,” Cook wrote in a judgment snippet published by the Gazette.
Nicklin noted that the claims were simple in nature, and “the fact that these claimants are well-known, and the litigation high-profile, does not affect the issues that must be resolved.”
Prince Harry and ex-Labour member of parliament Lord Tom Watson had reached a settlement with News Group Newspapers last week.
