For most of the last two decades, a costs lawyer's job was fairly self-contained: the case had already been run, the file was closed or closing, and the work was to turn what had happened into a bill, defend it, and recover as much of it as possible. That's still a large part of what we do. But it's no longer the whole of it, and it's worth explaining why.
The gap we kept running into
Working almost entirely at the detailed assessment end of a case means you see, again and again, the same kinds of problems: a retainer that wasn't structured with recovery in mind, a budget that was agreed without anyone really stress-testing it, funding decisions made early on that made the costs position harder to defend later. By the time a costs lawyer is brought in to prepare or negotiate a bill, most of those decisions are locked in. There's not much to be done about a funding structure that's already three years old.
That's the gap: the firms and clients who most needed advice on funding, budgeting and case management were usually the ones who only found us once it was too late to act on it.
Widening the practice
So the practice has widened to cover the earlier stages too — funding and panel advice at the outset, costs case management and budget monitoring through the life of the case, alongside the detailed assessment and recovery work we've always done. The aim isn't to become a different kind of firm. It's to be involved early enough that the decisions made at the start of a case are actually informed by how they'll play out at the end of it.
In practice, that means the same team that would eventually assess a bill is now, on many matters, also the team that helped set the retainer and the budget in the first place. That continuity is the real change: not a new service bolted on, but the same costs expertise applied earlier, when it can still change the outcome.
What that means for clients
For law firms, it means a costs adviser who understands recovery risk from day one, not just at the point of assessment. For their clients, it means funding and budget decisions that are made with a realistic view of what will actually be recoverable, rather than found out the hard way once the case has finished.
It's the same discipline we've always applied to a bill of costs, just moved to where it can do the most good: at the start.