About Us

CCCL is geared to providing a complete costs litigation service, with a specific emphasis on Claimant personal injury, medical negligence and commercial cases. We have offices in Central London, just off Chancery Lane and in Manchester City Centre. We currently have over 40 costs lawyers, draftsmen and negotiators; in addition we have a team of administrators who provide support to our fee earners. We also outsource a number of administrative departments including IT support, typing, HR support, book keeping and credit control.

Accordingly, whilst the fixed overheads are limited, we consider that, in terms of output, we would compete favorably with companies boasting over 40 staff. Staff are split between the London and Manchester offices.

Our aim is to create the largest and most professional costs consultancy in the UK by recruiting those with appropriate skill sets at the appropriate levels. We have a unique training policy, in which we have a minimum entry qualification of a 2:1 Law degree and an ongoing training scheme which will ultimately run into the ALCD student training programme.

We have a fast but controlled expansion programme which benefits from the flexibility generated by our ability to outsource some technical, and a significant amount of our administrative function at a high level.

Some particular selling points of our own service above our competitors are as follows:

1. We undertake all receiving party work on a CFA so there is no cost to the solicitor client, all of our fees are recovered from the Defendant in addition to (as opposed to deducted from) the Solicitor’s costs and disbursements.
2. Most of our competitors negotiate on informal schedules and only draw a bill as a last resort. This practice produces inferior recoveries for the solicitors for two reasons:

• The negotiation fee is deducted from the solicitors costs rather than claimed in addition,
• The full costs can only be calculated by preparation of a full bill of costs and invariably with schedules time is missed therefore immediately reducing the potential for recovery.

The reason why solicitors tolerate this is because of cash flow; traditionally, drawing a bill takes much longer than a schedule, however, by virtue of proper human resourcing, a tailor made case management system and state of the art bill drafting software, we can draw bills with the same turn around time that our competitors offer for schedules. This generates earlier sensible offers as serving a bill invokes a procedure which involves the Defendant in time and effort if they do not settle, or make a protective offer and it drives higher settlement rates with a significant increase in solicitors profit costs recovery. As soon as a bill is served the clock starts running ensuring defendants focus on settling the matter as failure to do so will see costs being assessed by the court if they are not agreed.

 To summarize therefore our system will:-

1. Maximise recovery of costs for the Solicitor.
2. Speed up the recovery process meaning faster payment of costs and disbursements.
3. Introduce a zero cost option for the solicitor to have their costs managed. The Defendant pays our fees on all matters with no recovery against the instructing Solicitor, which is guaranteed contractually.
4. Provide a simple and transparent mechanism for the recovery of costs and our fees. We are able to produce statistics to demonstrate how we have revolutionized the cost recovery process for some of our main clients.