Solicitor/Client Costs Disputes – A Middle Ground
Written by Nick McDonnell, Director and Costs Lawyer, Kain Knight Manchester.
Could a solicitor/client provisional assessment regime be the answer?
The Court of Appeal’s decision in Belsner v CAM Legal Services Ltd highlighted more than the technical operation of the Solicitors Act 1974. It also exposed a structural weakness in the way solicitor/client costs disputes are resolved.
In his judgment, the Master of the Rolls observed that it was “unsatisfactory” that businesses could adopt a model which generated expensive High Court litigation to assess relatively modest solicitors’ bills. He suggested that the Legal Ombudsman scheme would ordinarily provide a cheaper and more effective means of resolving such disputes, whilst concluding that the existing assessment regime “requires careful review and significant reform.”
That observation has prompted an important debate. However, experience since Belsner suggests that the answer is unlikely to lie exclusively with the Legal Ombudsman.
The Ombudsman performs an important consumer protection function, but it was never designed to become the principal forum for determining disputed legal fees. It investigates complaints about service, fairness and reasonableness rather than conducting forensic costs assessments. More significantly, as the Law Gazette reported on 29 July 2026 – ‘Ombudsman can’t cope with costs disputes, Law Society warns’ – it continues to face substantial pressures in terms of workload, delays and resources. Diverting increasing numbers of solicitor/client costs disputes into that system risks lengthening waiting times for all complainants whilst failing to provide the specialist costs determination that many fee disputes require.
At the opposite end of the spectrum lies the statutory assessment procedure under the Solicitors Act. Whilst an essential safeguard, it is often disproportionate for modest disputes. Applications may involve High Court proceedings, detailed pleadings, multiple hearings, substantial preparation costs and the inevitable uncertainty associated with litigation. In lower-value cases, the costs of resolving the dispute can approach, or even exceed, the amount actually in issue. That cannot be regarded as an efficient or accessible system for either solicitors or clients.
The current Civil Justice Council consultation paper on the reform of Part III, Solicitors Act 1974 presents an opportunity to bridge that gap.
One possible solution would be the introduction of a dedicated provisional assessment procedure for solicitor/client bills, modelled on the existing inter-partes provisional assessment regime contained within CPR.r.47.15.
Under such a system, disputed bills below a prescribed financial threshold could ordinarily be determined on paper by a specialist Costs Judge or authorised Costs Officer. The parties would exchange concise written submissions together with the relevant retainer documentation and bill. The court would then produce a written assessment without requiring an oral hearing.
Either party could retain the right to request an oral review, but only where justified and subject to an appropriate costs consequence where the reviewing party failed to achieve a materially improved outcome. Such a mechanism already operates successfully within provisional assessment and has demonstrated its ability to encourage realistic challenges whilst discouraging unnecessary hearings.
The advantages would be considerable. Clients would retain independent judicial scrutiny of solicitors’ bills without incurring the expense of full-scale litigation. Solicitors would benefit from a quicker, more predictable and specialist determination process. The courts would avoid unnecessary hearings, while the Legal Ombudsman could concentrate its finite resources on complaints concerning service and professional conduct rather than becoming the default forum for fee assessment.
Importantly, such a regime would not remove statutory protections. Instead, it would modernise the procedure through which those protections are enforced. It would preserve judicial oversight whilst introducing proportionality into disputes where the sums involved simply do not justify traditional High Court litigation.
The Solicitors Act has served the profession for more than fifty years, but the legal services market has changed dramatically. Fixed recoverable costs, increased consumer expectations, digital working and greater emphasis on proportionality all point towards the need for a more streamlined system.
The objective should not be to replace one imperfect process with another. Rather, it should be to create a sensible middle ground; one that preserves access to justice, protects consumers, respects the interests of solicitors and delivers specialist judicial determination through a procedure that is proportionate to the value of the dispute. A solicitor/client provisional assessment regime could provide precisely that balance and would represent a practical and welcome outcome of the Civil Justice Council’s review.
