Consultations

4(a) In Edinburgh        

Additional fee if held in prison   

4(b) Elsewhere within 60 miles journey by road from Edinburgh  

4(c) In Aberdeen, Inverness or Dumfries

4(d) Elsewhere beyond 60 miles journey by road from Edinburgh   Such fee as the Auditor considers appropriate with regard to the journey involved and the level of fees prescribed in this paragraph.

This is a fee which can be:

• increased because of the particular complexity or difficulty of the work or any other particular circumstances, where an increase is necessary to provide reasonable remuneration for the work
• reduced because of any particular circumstances, a reduced fee is sufficient to provide reasonable remuneration for the work.

As stated above the Schedule 2 Table of Fees was structured in a way that reflected the historical, but outdated, practice that assumed that counsel’s place of business was at Parliament House in Edinburgh.

The Table of Fees sets a prescribed fee for Edinburgh with higher rates being prescribed for Glasgow and Aberdeen, Inverness or Dumfries.

Where the Table of Fees refers to Edinburgh, or any other location, the fee level that is prescribed for that consultations works on the basis that travel, where appropriate, is from Edinburgh.

Counsel are self-employed practitioners and for the purposes of the Fees Regulations it is ordinarily accepted that counsels place of business should be based on where they normally reside.

In many cases that will be somewhere other than Edinburgh.

Accordingly, when we are assessing a fee the operation of the Table of Fees is applied flexibly to reflect your place of business.

For example:

• if you reside in Glasgow and consult in Glasgow or reside in Aberdeen and consult in Aberdeen you should have regard to the Edinburgh rate when charging your fee as you would be consulting in the city where you reside
• if you reside in Glasgow and travel to Edinburgh to consult you should have regard to the Glasgow rate when charging your fee to reflect the additional travel that has been engaged.

Where you elect to charge a different fee we recommend that you should have regard to rates from Tables of Fees which have been reviewed to reflect modern court practices and procedures, such as those under Schedule 2 of the Criminal Fees Regulations, which helpfully provide benchmark rates for a publically funded legal aid service which can reasonably be applied in contempt of court proceedings.

Otherwise you must justify the fee with reference to the factors in schedule 2, paragraph 3, that the fee is reasonable having regard to the particular complexity or difficulty of the work or any other particular circumstances.

A short, concise and focused narrative in support of the charge should be sufficient.

Where we are not satisfied that the fee claimed is reasonable based on the information available we will allow what we consider to be a reasonable fee and invite you to provide further information in support of the claim.

As previously stated contempt of court proceedings tend to be of short duration and as a result of the nature of these proceedings they do not tend to feature counsel and even where they do they do not normally involve many, if any, agent and client consultations.

Our approach to assessment of a consultation charge is to have regard to the following guidance.

The number and duration of consultations that are required in a case can vary significantly depending on the circumstances.

There are a number of factors that can affect the frequency or duration of meetings including:

• the legal complexities of the litigation
• the factual complexity of the matter or the difficulty or novelty of the issues raised
• the volume of productions
• the duration of the proceedings
• where an interpreter is required
• the vulnerabilities of the client and, in particular, ability to understand the proceedings and the consequences of their actions.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list.

Our role exercising our own skill, knowledge and experience is to assess whether the number of consultations claimed was reasonable, for the type of case that we are assessing.

The decision is a matter of balanced judgement rather than arithmetical calculation.

In order that we can reach an informed view on the number of consultations we expect the narrative to contain brief details as to the instructions taken, the advice given and how the case was progressed sufficient to justify the fee that has been claimed.

This does not mean that we expect, nor require, every word of the advice given or every detail on the law and procedure to be adopted – often advice on a particular procedure will be relatively standard – but we expect to see some reflection in the narrative of the purpose of the consultation with particular reference to the personal circumstances of the client and the advice given on the case.

The greater the number of consultations claimed, the more detail should be provided.

Charges for a ‘consultation with client’ or ‘consultation with crown’ etc. are, in the absence of any additional detail, unhelpful and are unlikely to provide any insight as to the information that has been imparted or received and will almost certainly result in us having to disallow the charge.

In the absence of either a supporting detail which justifies the charge or of any other appropriate supporting evidence we will normally restrict consultations to a number that we consider to be reasonable based on the information available and invite you to provide more information in support of the charge which has been made.

We will not pay for a consultation where it is apparent that a meeting was not necessary to advance the case.