Costs Lawyer

Costs Lawyers are regulated legal professionals specialising in legal costs — the fees charged by solicitors and other legal representatives for conducting litigation, and the process by which those costs are assessed, negotiated, and recovered between parties and from clients. The Costs Lawyer Standards Board (CLSB) is the independent statutory regulator of Costs Lawyers under the Legal Services Act 2007.

The work of a Costs Lawyer covers the full lifecycle of legal costs: preparing bills of costs (itemised schedules of all work done and disbursements incurred by a legal team in litigation), negotiating costs with the paying party or their insurers, pursuing detailed assessment proceedings in the costs court where costs cannot be agreed, and advising clients and solicitors on costs budgeting under the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) costs management regime.

Costs budgeting is a major area of work following the Jackson Reforms (2013): in multi-track civil cases, parties are required to file and exchange costs budgets at the outset of litigation, and the costs judge may impose a Costs Management Order limiting recoverable costs to the budgeted amounts. Costs Lawyers prepare, argue, and negotiate costs budgets and costs management orders at costs and case management conferences (CCMCs).

Detailed assessment work involves attending the Senior Courts Costs Office (SCCO) or a county court for formal assessment of costs where the parties cannot agree — presenting the bill of costs to a Costs Judge or Costs Officer, responding to points of dispute raised by the paying party, and arguing the reasonableness and proportionality of each cost item. Costs Lawyers have rights of audience in costs proceedings as part of their regulated status.

The Association of Costs Lawyers (ACL) represents the profession, and the CLSB qualification route leads to Costs Lawyer status through the ACL's Level 6 Legal Costs qualification and assessed practice.

Legal costs are an inevitable feature of civil litigation — every contested case generates a costs dispute, and the Jackson Reforms have made costs management a mandatory part of multi-track civil litigation. The volume of personal injury litigation (motor accidents, clinical negligence, employers' liability), commercial disputes, and family proceedings generates a large and permanent workload for legal costs professionals. The CLSB's regulated status under the Legal Services Act 2007 protects the Costs Lawyer title and creates a quality-assured professional market.

The complexity of the CPR costs rules — costs budgeting, detailed assessment, proportionality principles, and the qualified one-way costs shifting (QOCS) regime in personal injury — is continuously increasing, sustaining demand for specialist costs expertise. Insurance companies, law firms, litigation funders, and publicly funded clients all require Costs Lawyer expertise to manage costs exposure. The profession is small (approximately 1,200 Costs Lawyers) relative to the volume of litigation, sustaining a premium market for qualified practitioners.

Morning: preparing a bill of costs for a personal injury case that settled after 18 months of litigation — working through the solicitor's fee earner time records, disbursements schedule, and counsel's fees to produce a detailed itemised bill for submission to the paying party's insurers. Afternoon: attending a Costs and Case Management Conference (CCMC) at the High Court for a commercial litigation case — presenting the claimant's costs budget to the Master, responding to the defendant's challenges to specific budget phases, and seeking a costs management order at the budgeted figures. Late afternoon: reviewing a complex set of points of dispute on a costs assessment — identifying the arguments in response to the paying party's objections and preparing the Replies to Points of Dispute for SCCO proceedings.