This article titled “‘This is a court of justice not a casino,’ judge tells lawyers over £1.1m fees” was written by Randeep Ramesh, for The Guardian on Thursday 3rd March 2016 14.46 UTCJohn Fawcett has joined the firm as Partner
A judge has chastised individual lawyers for charging up to £400,000 in their successful defence of a billionaire sheikh accused of being involved in the torture of a British citizen, saying the high court was a “court of justice not a casino”.
Judge Blake ruled last month that Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, a former Qatari prime minister worth an estimated £8bn, could not be sued in London over claims that agents acting on his behalf falsely imprisoned and tortured Fawaz al-Attiya, a former official spokesman for the emirate.
The high court said that since the sheikh had been appointed to a role at Qatar’s London embassy in November 2013, he was shielded by diplomatic immunity.
Hamad bin Jassim, known as HBJ, had hired David Pannick, Britain’s most prominent human rights Queen’s counsel, to head his defence team. Lord Pannick shot to fame in the 1980s when he appeared for the Sunday Times in the Spycatcher case and has since acted for the Queen, and defended the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the rights of gay soldiers.
Court documents show Pannick charged £407,250 for a defence involving a two-day trial, which he did not attend. His colleague Monica Carss-Frisk QC, who did appear, put in a fee for £228,150.
At these rates of pay, Pannick would appear to be more expensive to hire than Jonathan Sumption, who was paid almost £8m – the highest fee in British legal history – for defending the Chelsea football club owner, Roman Abramovich. Lord Sumption, now a supreme court judge, charged that sum for work over a period of 10 months – about £40,000 a day in court.
The former Qatari prime minister had employed a City law firm – Macfarlanes – and four pre-eminent QCs, as well as two junior counsels. His legal bills amount to more than £1.1m. This sum is being claimed from Attiya, who will also have to cover his own costs, which amount to less than £200,000, with brief’s fees of £30,000.
However, last week the judge intervened to halt the payments, saying that his “initial response to sums allegedly claimed is that this is [a] court of justice not a casino and costs must be reasonable and proportionate to the issue in hand, and the sums identified by the claimant as those claimed by the defendant would not be.”
Blake, who refused to hear Attiya’s appeal in the high court, said he would make “no award for payment” because there was “no basis for forming an estimate of the defendant’s reasonable cost”. Instead, both sides will have to negotiate an agreed settlement. Attiya is believed to be seeking permission to have the court of appeal hear his case.
The issue of rising legal fees has been a source of much debate since the government first tried to reduce costs by initiating cuts to legal aid in 2013 – a move that provoked a backlash at the Bar. The current justice secretary has since put further cuts, to criminal legal aid, on hold.
Last month, in a case involving a privacy action against the publicist Max Clifford by Princess Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell, the deputy judge Richard Spearman said he had concerns about “disproportionality between the value of the claim and the costs involved”.
When contacted, Pannick, who also write a column for the Times, said he had no comment to make on the judge’s words or his costs. The peer is a regular contributor to debates, and recognised as a “leader of the crossbenchers” with an “incredible influence” in parliament.
According to his website, Pannick has “appeared in 100 cases in the appellate committee of the House of Lords (before the opening of the new supreme court), and has argued more than 25 cases in the European court of justice in Luxembourg and over 30 cases in the European court of human rights in Strasbourg”.
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