Legal Aid Agency Introduce CLAIM1C form
The Legal Aid Agency has introduced a new form that can be used instead of the CLAIM1/1A when submitting a claim following a court assessment of a Bill of Costs.
The CLAIM1C form is not mandatory at present although the LAA have stated that they may make it mandatory in the future.
The form can be accessed here. Whilst we feel that the introduction of a form specific to claiming for court assessed bills is essentially a good idea, we unfortunately think that the new form as it stands will often take longer to complete than a CLAIM1/1A. The reason for this is the far more detailed ‘Summary of Claim’ section that can be found on page 2. Instead of simply giving the main totals as assessed (like a CLAIM1/1A), the section requires a breakdown of how many hours/ units were undertaken by panel members as compared to non-panel members and the costs involved. Unfortunately the format of a bill of costs, as required by the Court, sets out the costs in a different way and time would therefore have to be spent going through the entire bill in order to calculate the totals required for the breakdown sought in the CLAIM1C, rather than simply taking figures from the summary of the bill. The larger the bill the more time consuming this task could become.
We therefore recommend that you continue to use the CLAIM1/1A forms at this stage.
Back to summary