Cook on Costs 2010

Description:

BOOK REVIEW

COOK ON COSTS 2010

By

Michael J.Cook

ISBN: 978-1-4057-4233-7

Butterworths LexisNexis

http://www.lexisnexis.org.uk/legal/handbooks/p/142/

THE LANDSCAPE OF MODERN LEGAL COSTS:

HOW TO KEEP UP WITH THE DIZZYING

PACE OF CHANGE

An appreciation by Phillip Taylor MBE and Elizabeth Taylor of Richmond Green Chambers

Legal services: what do they cost? What should they cost? How are costs determined? Where do you go for authoritative, well informed, reliable advice?

Whether you’re a solicitor, barrister, judge, or cost draftsman, your first port of call could well be “Cook on Costs 2010”, and it is for most professionals today.

Michael Cook has long been known for his expertise in this complicated area which inevitably lends itself all too often to dissension and dispute. But here you have Cook’s up to date, authoritative and easily accessible work which focuses on the practical aspects of costs, with clear, straightforward explanation and examination of every aspect of the remuneration of solicitors and barristers for work done.

Thoroughly and comprehensively, Michael Cook covers the entitlement and quantification of contentious and non-contentious legal business brilliantly, and it includes costs between the parties and family costs. Private and public funding of litigation is also covered and the text is helpfully illustrated with decided cases, many of which you won’t find in the law reports. There are verbatim extracts from all landmark costs judgments and all the relevant statutes, rules and regulations governing civil costs are also included.

Law Society President Michael Napier puts it succinctly thus: ‘the funding of litigation – whether the case can be funded and who pays what to whom at the end – has become a new and essential skill for litigators everywhere.’

Fortunately “Cook on Costs” has been with us since 1991, and is now annual helping the profession ‘steer its way through the costs maze’ very effectively. Napier adds that due to the ‘dizzying pace of change’, (recall that the law lords have disappeared and solicitors are no longer ‘of the Supreme Court’ but ‘of the Senior Courts’ to site only two examples) a reference work like this needs to be published yearly. So, that is what “Cook on Costs” actually is: the 2010 annual edition of this familiar title, which first came on the scene 19 years ago.

“Cook on Costs 2010” is now an invaluable work of reference across the legal profession, including in addition to the straightforward pithy text, the tables of statutes…statutory instruments…Civil Procedure Rules…Practice Directions about costs supplementing CPR Parts 43 to 48…non-statutory provisions…and cases, and also Michael Cook’s great sense of descriptive humour.

Of particular interest during these fraught times in the new decade of the 21st century remains the lengthy and detailed chapter (over 100 pages long) on conditional fees with almost certain change on the near horizon. Read, note, digest and decide whether conditional fees in all their variants are the right route for you because it may be all change by the middle of the year!

The law is stated in the 2010 edition as at 1st November 2009, and with the modern landscape of costs, Cook has kept pace with the dizzying change and we are all grateful to him for his wisdom and keen understanding of this perplexing aftermath of litigation.

ISBN: 978-1-4057-4233-7