This morning, saw the publication of consultation paper by the Civil Justice Council Working Party on reform to the Solicitors Act 1974. The paper is long delayed, as it was expected to be ready a year ago. But its arrival is most welcome, and the contents and recommendations are intriguing.
I shall enjoy reading the paper at leisure, and taking the opportunity to ruminate on its proposals in greater detail, in due course. But there are three particular points, which are worth noting even on the basis of a preliminary review.
The first is the proposal that a large tranche of solicitor and client fee disputes, consumer disputes over bills of up to £50,000 will be effectively removed from the County Court and Senior Courts Costs Office, by making it mandatory that an internal complaints be used, then a complaint to the Ombudsman, but thereafter only if there is good reason, could an application to the courts be made. This could drastically reduce the amount of (not so) small solicitor and client disputes and will impact on those firms who work to bring challenges in this space.
Secondly, as Dan Stacey and I predicted earlier this week in our Solicitor and Client Costs Webinar (copies available on request) the distinction between contentious and non contentious costs is proposed to be abolished: and the criteria for determining whether costs are chargeable, will dispense with the concept of informed consent (query the role for CPR 46.9) and simply be whether the costs claimed are “fair and reasonable” applying what might be considered a mixed objective and subjective test.
Thirdly, the concept of the statutory bill, will be abolished. There will be a time limit of 1 year to challenge the bill. All the sterile debates currently enjoyed in the SCCO about whether a bill, is a “bill”, and whether it is a final “bill” or a Chamberlain bill, will be swept away, in an oncoming tide of common sense.
The text of the consultation paper can be found here: