Costs judge raises barrister’s pay to £650 after reviewing time spent on appeal work
A barrister has secured an additional £250 in fees after the Senior Courts Costs Office ruled that he should be paid more for preparing appeal grounds which he said took him an entire weekend to complete.
Tim Banks, who represented Jetmir Topuzi in a rape appeal, brought the challenge after being paid £400 by the Legal Aid Agency for work he said required 13.5 hours of preparation time. Mr Topuzi had sought permission to appeal against his conviction, but the application was unsuccessful.
Mr Banks had submitted a fee note for £1,250 plus VAT for the preparation of the advice and grounds of appeal. The Legal Aid Agency’s determining officer initially allowed £350 plus VAT for the work. After reconsideration, the officer added a further £50, bringing the total to £400.
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The officer’s decision was based on the view that, because Mr Banks had acted for the client at trial, he was already “very familiar with the facts and issues in this appeal.”
Senior Costs Judge Rowley reviewed the decision and partially upheld the barrister’s challenge. In his ruling, he said: “Mr Banks told me that he had spent a lot of time researching the law when producing this document and spent the entire weekend producing it. He did not regard the case as being at all straightforward and he did not consider the sentencing note he had previously drafted had much relevance when preparing the advice and grounds of appeal.”
The judge noted that the 10-page advice and grounds document “does not, on the face of it, support the amount of time spent and therefore the fee claimed.” He said that, in his assessment, some of the time recorded appeared to have been spent “seeking to improve the merits of the appeal” even though “there was only so much that could be said in Topuzi’s favour.”
Judge Rowley said the court could not support the full fee claimed by counsel, explaining: “Otherwise, there may be little to prevent an over-eager advocate in another case from pursuing all manner of potential avenues and producing a fee note to reflect those endeavours.”
However, he also found that the amount allowed by the determining officer was too low. He considered that the £400 total did not properly reflect the amount of work involved and awarded £650 instead.