Tag: E-Bill

Disbursements & the E-bill

Tanya Foran2 Comments

A disbursement is a payment made on behalf of a client or third party, for which reimbursement is subsequently sought from the client. In COP terms, this means a payment made by the Deputy that needs to be reimbursed by the Protected Party.  

With the new E-Bill, all work now needs to be categorised. This also applies to disbursements. The types of categories in the E-Bill are as follows:  

  • travel expenses 
  • costs draftsman’s fees  
  • counsel’s fees  
  • court fees  
  • bank fees  
  • internal solicitor fees 
  • external solicitor fees 
  • OPG fee  
  • courier fees 
  • land registry fees  
  • expert fees  
  • other  

Many of the items in the list do not need to be assessed and would be better placed in the annual Deputyship report (e.g. court fees) and as such, this has caused some confusion as to what disbursements need to be assessed and what disbursements do not need to be assessed. As a result of the confusion, we obtained guidance from the costs officers.  

According to the Costs Officers, the disbursements that MUST be included in a general management bill for assessment are:  

  • travel expenses  
  • counsel’s fees  
  • bank fees  
  • land registry fees 
  • courier fees  
  • expert fees  

The Costs Officers also advised that internal and external solicitor fees would be dependent on the case and the orders made. Whilst these fees are not usually included in general management files, should this come up on one of your matters and you are unsure, please ask us for further guidance. 

In certain applications (such as Statutory Wills) there will be no Deputyship report where disbursements can be claimed. In these types of bills, ALL disbursements incurred must be claimed within the bill – if not claimed in the bill you will not be able to bill the disbursement to the client. 

For more information, please contact Tanya Foran by email at Tanya.Foran@clarionsolicitors.com. 

E-Bill FAQs – How does the new Court of Protection E-Bill work?

Laura SugarmanLeave a comment

From 1 November 2022 the COP E-Bill came into force. This will look slightly different to the Bills that COP practitioners are used to and will include some additional information including various categories and a separate part for the inclusion of P’s assets. We recently participated in a successful pilot scheme and will be submitting all Bills from 1 November 2022 in this new format.

Below are some common queries about the E-Bill and how to resolve these.

How does the Deputy or person authorised by the firm to sign on behalf of the Deputy certify the Bill of Costs?

The Deputy or authorised person is still required to certify the Bill as before. However, on the new E-Bill format the legal representative’s name can be typed or printed into the ‘Certification’ tab. Please be aware that the ‘Post Assessment Certificates’ section is only to be certified once you are requesting the Final Costs Certificate following assessment.

Where will information relating to any interim payments taken be entered?

Similarly to the PDF Bills, the E-Bill requires you to disclose any interim payments taken on account of costs for the period. This information should be entered on the ‘Certification’ tab in the first box.

How will the new E-Bill be E-filed using the SCCO portal?

The process for E-filing the Bill of Costs remains very much the same. You are still required to submit the certified Bill, Order, certified N258B and disbursement evidence as before, but use the new options on the E-filing service beginning ‘COP E-Bill’. If the Bill and N258B are not certified by an authorised person, then the submission will be rejected by the SCCO.

What will happen to the E-Bill on assessment?

Once the E-Bill is received and approved by the SCCO, it will be allocated to a Costs Officer who will review and assess in the usual way. The Costs Officer is able to make changes to the Bill where appropriate and the E-Bill will recalculate this automatically. The Costs Officer will use a series of codes and mark these on the E-Bill so that you can determine the reasons given for the reductions.

How will the E-Bill be returned following assessment?

The E-Bill now includes a contact email address section on the front sheet, which should be completed when drafting the Bill. Following assessment, the E-Bill will be sent via email to the address provided.

How should the E-Bill be served on interested parties where required?

If you are required to serve the Bill on interested parties then this should be provided to them as a PDF version of the E-Bill. Please request this from your Costs Draftsperson who would be more than willing to assist.

How can I ensure my E-Bill is compliant with new the new requirements?

There are some new requirements when using the E-Bill format that are likely to cause some minor issues if they are missed. Below are some ways in which you can assist your Costs Draftsperson in ensuring the E-Bill is ready to be submitted to the SCCO.

SCCO reference – there is a section on the front sheet that relates to the unique SCCO reference for each matter. This can be inputted prior to submission to the SCCO to help avoid any rejections based on the matter already existing. Please provide the SCCO reference to your Costs Draftsperson if known.

OPG105 estimated costs – there is an increased emphasis on providing the OPG105 estimated costs for the period when using the E-Bill. Please provide the OPG105 costs estimate to your Costs Draftsperson so that this can be included in the Bill.

P’s assets – the E-Bill now includes a specific section relating to P’s assets so that the Costs Officer can consider these. Please provide this information to your Costs Draftsperson and they will include it in the Bill accordingly.

Fee earner rates – please provide a breakdown of the fee earners who have worked on the matter and their date of professional qualification so that these can be included in the Bill.

Amendments – if you require any amendments to the E-Bill please consult your Costs Draftsperson. The E-Bill uses complex algorithms to calculate the totals within the Bill and any changes made could affect these and corrupt the Bill. We therefore recommend that you ask your Costs Draftsperson to make any amendments you require, rather than attempting this yourself, as it could cause issues with the E-Bill later down the line.

The introduction of the COP E-Bill will revolutionise the COP sector and should have a positive impact on assessment times and also result in less administration time following assessment, as the Bill is automatically recalculated in this format.

Additional information on E-Bills can be found here: https://www.judiciary.uk/guidance-and-resources/electronic-bills-in-court-of-protection-cases-pilot-in-the-senior-courts-costs-office/

You can find out more about our services here or you can contact the Costs and Litigation Funding team at costs.support@clarionsolicitors.com

The Electronic Bill Pilot in the Senior Courts Costs Office

maidiedeightonLeave a comment

From 1 November 2022 until 28 April 2023, professional Deputies appointed by the Court of Protection, their legal representatives and other legal professionals involved in Court of Protection cases are able to submit bills in respect of general management and other applications where the relevant authority has been obtained from the Court of Protection in electronic spreadsheet form, known as the E-Bill.

Approved templates for use are available via the judiciary website, https://www.judiciary.uk/guidance-and-resources/electronic-bills-in-court-of-protection-cases-pilot-in-the-senior-courts-costs-office/ and E-bills are to be filed using CE File. When filing an E-Bill, the options titled ‘COP-E’ in CE File should be selected, and once assessed by the Costs Officers, the bills will be returned electronically.

In accordance with the start of the pilot scheme due to commence on 1 November 2022, the Costs Team at Clarion will be fully prepared for this change and will proceed with drafting E-Bills on behalf of our clients. 

Please read Stephanie Kaye’s blog ‘The COP E-Bill – the good, the bad and the technical’ for further information regarding how the E-Bill will work, how to prepare the bill and the impact on COP practitioners.

The COP E-Bill – the good, the bad and the technical

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Maidie Deighton at maidie.deighton@clarionsolicitors.com.

The COP E-Bill – the good, the bad and the technical

Stephanie Kaye1 Comment

The COP E-Bill has been in the pipeline for well over a year and the E-Bill pilot will start on the 1st of November 2022. Stephanie Kaye shares what practitioners need to know about the change, including when we can expect it and what it means practically for deputies.

When will it go live?

The consultation for the E-Bill concluded in May 2022. It was then necessary for the E-Bill working group to meet and discuss the comments made about the E-Bill to decide if any further changes or tweaks were required. The working group consists of Costs Judge Leonard, Costs Officer Leggett, Costs Officer Prendergast, Richard Benn from CostsMaster, Andrew McAulay from Clarion, Stephanie Kaye from Clarion and Ian Gibson from Irwin Mitchell.

Many useful observations were made during the consultation which needed to be incorporated or changed in the latest version of the COP E-Bill. This is a time-consuming process, coupled with the Costs Officer training needed at the SCCO, meaning that the final E-Bill will launch in pilot form in the autumn on the 1st of November 2022. Once live, the E-Bill will be accepted by the SCCO for assessment but will not yet be compulsory.

Electronic bills in Court of Protection cases – Pilot in the Senior Courts Costs Office | Courts and Tribunals Judiciary

What is so different about the E-Bill?

Simply put, the E-Bill is in Microsoft Excel format compared with the Microsoft Word format of the traditional COP Bill. Excel is much better for calculations and therefore provides a slicker, fresher alternative to the usual assessment whilst being equally as accessible by all. The benefits of the E-Bill include things like typed comments from the SCCO as to the reductions made, making it very straightforward to follow, and automatically recalculated Bills allowing you to instantly see what has been allowed on assessment.

There is a new requirement to tell the SCCO about the Protected Party’s asset value. This is to ensure that there are sufficient funds to meet the outcome of the assessment, but it also allows the Costs Officer to consider if the costs incurred are proportionate to the value of the estate – something that wasn’t quite so transparent before.

If it’s a general management year, you/the Draftsperson are required to input the OPG105 estimate in the Bill of Costs. Again, this is much more transparent and will allow the Costs Officer to easily see if you have exceeded your predicted costs, potentially making your costs vulnerable on assessment.

We are all familiar with some of the illegible comments of Costs Officers in the current Bills as we know them. The E-Bill provides a space for the Costs Officers to type their comments and justification regarding the reductions made and after assessment, a table of findings (Tab 15) will be populated with the relevant reductions which apply to your case. This not only means that you know what is reduced, but also why.

There are also several handy things to note about the E-Bill, too. This has been developed to be very user friendly and efficient, with many, many meetings in the background to test different functions and ensure it works. One useful tool is that there is an email address box on the front of the Bill. This is the email that the assessed Bill of Costs will be sent to at your firm and it’s up to you to choose a suitable address, meaning that there are no waiting times following the outcome, speeding up the process.

It is expected that the E-Bill will be signed electronically as it is not possible to add a wet signature to an E-Bill. Tab 11 is the traditional certificates page that we are all familiar with.

Practically, how does it work?

As for the content of the Bill, this remains largely unchanged, however it is presented in a different way. Tab 6 of the Bill shows all work undertaken collectively in various columns, collating the previous documents schedule and party work that we are used to seeing separately. This can look quite overwhelming, particularly if it’s a bigger case, but the filter options will assist the Costs Officer in narrowing down what exactly they are looking for. One addition within the E-Bill is the requirement for an activity code to be selected for each entry of time by the Draftsperson, allowing the Costs Officer to filter by that activity on assessment to see alternative filters of the work undertaken (for example, they may wish to filter by ‘travel’ allowing them to see the overall cost of travel incurred, regardless of which party it is accrued against). A table of what these activities are is in Tab 16. The E-Bill is much more flexible than the previous Bill in this regard, as there are multiple categories which could be used to filter specific work types or parties, allowing the Costs Officer to undertake a more robust assessment.

The E-Bill is colour coded in columns, separating the columns of the work as claimed and which columns are exclusively for the Costs Officer’s use. The blue columns (time allowed, fee earner allowed and fee earner rate allowed) can be edited by the Costs Officer as they see fit. Again, the transparent nature of the E-Bill will then clearly show what was previously claimed against what was allowed by the Costs Officer in those different columns. Any cells edited by the Costs Officer are then highlighted in yellow, clearly showing where the Bill has been reduced or changed.

Once the Costs Officer has undertaken their assessment, this auto-populates a Bill breakdown in Tab 7 showing what was claimed and what was allowed as a whole. There is also space here for the Costs Officer to give any directions, which are easily missed in the current Bill of Costs as they are not always legible.

The E-Bill then goes on to provide various summaries, mainly to allow other ways of filtering depending on what the Costs Officer wants to review and/or what the firm wants to see has been allowed. It provides an activity summary (Tab 8), a communications summary which is similar to the traditional layout of the standard Bill of Costs broken down by parties (Tab 9), and a fee earner grade summary (Tab 10) which may assist some firms with Billing after assessment.

Tab 12 of the E-Bill is the traditional Bill summary required by the SCCO after assessment when requesting the Final Costs Certificate. Again, this is auto-populated with the costs allowed following assessment, avoiding the usual administrative work.

Tab 13 is the traditional Final Costs Certificate and again, this is auto-populated with the costs.

How will this impact COP practitioners?

The E-Bill will make life easier for the Deputy and their team. The assessment will be returned quicker, the comments will be legible and the assessment is automatically recalculated, dramatically reducing the administrative burden. It will take more time for the Draftsperson to prepare the Bill as a result of the activity breakdown required.

Deputies must be mindful of their OPG105 estimates (if a general management case) as the Costs Officer will have greater visibility of the costs incurred compared with what was predicted, which could potentially result in sizeable reductions to the Bill if the estimate was incorrect and not revised during the year.

Ultimately, the introduction of the COP E-Bill will be positive for professional Deputies and the change should be embraced by all. If you have any further questions regarding this article or the E-Bill, please contact Stephanie Kaye directly.