It may be easy for outsiders to think that being a Costs Lawyer is a narrow, dry job that involves little more than going through files of completed cases and counting letters.

That may have been the case once upon a time but, as a roundtable organised recently by ACL Training heard, nothing could be further from the truth in 2024.

Glenn Newberry, a Costs Lawyer and head of costs at international law firm Eversheds Sutherland, where he was the first non-solicitor partner, said that, through all of the upheavals in costs over the past 30 years, “the profession has grown, it's evolved, it's developed”.

The introduction of costs budgeting in particular has changed the focus of the job, the real benefit being that Costs Lawyers are now integral to the litigation from the start, rather than the people brought in at the end. 

He explained: “Project management and budgeting, and being able to track legal spend, are really important for commercial clients. You need the ability to produce, track and correct budgets, spot trends, have conversations with the client about why things are going to cost more than we said they were, or find ways to be more efficient. It’s taken the job, and the profession, away from just being a tail-end consideration.”

At the same time, cautioned Owen Poole, who runs OP Costs Drafting in Kent, the profession has to be careful that some of these aspects of the job are not taken over by the new breed of legal project managers that some large law firms are developing. There are aspects of project managing litigation that are very different from project managing transactions, which is where the profession comes in. “It’s a very important area that is ripe for growth for Costs Lawyers,” he said; the same went for helping law firms with pricing.

Victoria Morrison-Hughes, who runs Integral Legal Costs in Manchester and sits on the council of the Association of Costs Lawyers, agreed that “we are a fundamental part of the legal team, and our role is arguably more rewarding, more litigious, more demanding, than that of the solicitor's role itself”. This is because Costs Lawyers range across different areas of practice and can also appear regularly in court.

Indeed, for Louise Walker-Kelly, a dual-qualified solicitor and Costs Lawyer at national law firm Irwin Mitchell, it was the advocacy opportunities that were a big part of the appeal after she left criminal defence work at another firm – due to the huge difficulties of legal aid practice – and moved initially into personal injury work at Irwin Mitchell. “I like the technical aspects of it, but I've got higher rights of audience and so I can do the hearings. For me, it merged both my interests in one.”

For her colleague Nicholas Northrop, head of costs, technical and development at Irwin Mitchell, the “great thing” about the profession was that “we're so used to change – not only of case law and legislation, but how our practices are run”. He went on: “We like change. We like the variety of the work that's undertaken. With costs, it goes into all the different specialisms of legal sector and also advocacy. There are a lot of solicitors out there who never attend court.”

“The reason we are so good is because we get to look at files day in and day out, and solicitors don't,” said Owen Poole. “They work on their file, but they don't see other people's files. This is why being a Costs Lawyer is such a great profession, in that we get to see the good, the bad and the ugly. We get to see how to do things right, how to do things wrong. And we can transfer that knowledge to budgeting and pricing.”

It is this variety and the ability to become a fully authorised lawyer – which is why Glenn Newberry was able to become a partner at a firm of solicitors – that has given ACLT the confidence to promote the recently revamped Costs Lawyer Professional Qualification (CLPQ) as a career in itself, and not just an area of law people come to part-way through their legal careers.

David Hughes, a director of KE Costs Lawyers in Liverpool and a leading advocate for how the profession can support social mobility, said: “Our job is to show people how we can be an alternative career to being a solicitor or a barrister. So if we create the noise and tell people that it is a viable profession, where you can have well-rounded skills, you can do everything, you're not just pigeonholed into being in a research team or a drafting team or a negotiation team, that you can do everything if you want to, then I think that's going to be attractive”.

Both Owen Poole and Victoria Weinrich-Cooke, head of costs in the Leeds office of MRN Solicitors, have had lengthy careers in costs but only recently actually qualified as Costs Lawyers, jointly winning the ACL Cup for the highest mark. Life had got in the way for them when previously considering it, but Owen said he chose to do it now in part because of the possibility that certain tasks could become restricted just to Costs Lawyers but “also for my own personal development”.

Victoria said it was to “fill in the groundwork underneath” as she had had to correct people when they mistook her for a Costs Lawyer. “I thought, why shouldn't I be a Costs Lawyer? I'm doing all the things that a Costs Lawyer would do, so let's do the course.”

She recounted: “It was an extremely intensive course but so much more enjoyable than I thought it would be because it tested the areas of costs that I hadn't actually come into contact with, or had come into contact with but forgotten about. It also helped me understand where I might be able to improve on skills that I felt I'd already honed, such as advocacy.”

Nicholas Northrop, who has been in costs for 30 years, is currently studying the new CLPQ so as to better understand its demands, which he can then share with future trainees at Irwin Mitchell. “And if I can do it as a head of costs, with a very large practice and a family, then I can share that with people and help motivate them.” As Irwin Mitchell is the largest employer of Costs Lawyers in the country, he can also feed back to ACLT about the course.

That the course is now two years, rather than the previous three, was better for employers but also made it easier for students to commit to, he added – you finish the first year and know that you will be qualified 12 months later. “Two years isn't a long period, and there's not so much that can get in the way. When you stretch it to three years or four years, life can take a turn.”

Alongside this is the work to develop a Costs Lawyer apprenticeship, which it is hoped will go live next year. Victoria Weinrich-Cooke said it was “a great idea because there's no better experience than on-the-job training. If it can be dovetailed with the academic side of things, it's going to assist people coming into this hugely technical area, where the case law moves like quicksand, to carve out a really good career in what I think is one of the more interesting areas of law”.

She added that going through the qualification, “understanding what a person has to go through to come out the other end”, has changed the way she recruits.

ACLT chair Sarah Hutchinson – a solicitor who qualified 35 years ago and admitted she had never set foot in a courtroom – said the CLPQ offers “a great opportunity for new people to join the profession, either directly from school or at a later stage. They want to develop their careers, but they don't want to give up work. They want to earn and learn at the same time, and I think that's what the apprenticeship does so well.” The course provides students with the fundamentals they need for a legal career and the specialist skills for costs. 

“We really want to send the message to the future professionals just what an exciting and interesting career it is and, particularly with the launch of our new programme, to say just how much more flexible and accessible the qualification is.”

As well as being shorter, the CLPQ has a different assessment strategy from its predecessor, with assessments are concentrated at certain points of the year so that students can plan those windows of time around their existing commitments.

But there are still plenty of challenges. One is having the guideline hourly rates recognise that Costs Lawyers can be grade A fee-earners – the rates specify them at grade B. Glenn Newberry said: “I manage and supervise and coach and train people who are solicitors, who are chartered legal executives, and they can recover grade A rates and I by definition can’t, which seems to make very little sense.”

Part of this challenge, said Victoria Morrison-Hughes, was to “continue building awareness of what we do and who we are, and the diversity of our role and our expertise, particularly as we envisage there will be more solicitor-client disputes as a consequence of the fixed-costs regime”.

David Hughes is taking the message to schools – going to events and holding mock assessments and offering paid work experience. “It might not be immediate, but we're creating a link to local talent, and then a few years down the line, hopefully that will be the next batch of apprentices and in time the next qualified Costs Lawyers.”

The costs market continues to be a mixed economy of in-house teams and independent costs firms. Many more senior Costs Lawyers have experience of both. Nicholas Northrop described working for an independent costs firm as great education before settling in-house. “Once you're in-house, whilst you may have a variety of practices, cases are generally running the same way. But in independent practice, you can see such a wealth of different practices, both good and bad, across the legal sector.”

There are other opportunities, such as internationally. Glenn Newberry said these were two-fold: first in common law jurisdictions – both bills of costs and the law are very similar in Hong Kong, for example – and second in international arbitration. The costs rules operate in a similar way, although “arbitrators tend to give the detail of costs a little bit less scrutiny”.

Victoria Morrison-Hughes highlighted the push towards mediation and said she had seen more of it in solicitor-client disputes. “It's something I encourage my clients, if they’re litigants in-person, to consider because it's definitely a quicker and a cheaper resolution than going through the complicated and lengthy solicitor-client dispute process of the courts.”

Victoria Weinrich-Cooke, who is also an accredited mediator, said that, in addition to costs, there were opportunities to mediate disputes in other areas of law. Costs Lawyers have the fundamental legal skills needed to grasp them and “sometimes it's better to have no real bias or technical knowledge of the area, so you can see things in a different way”.

For Nicholas Northrop, the final piece of the puzzle is Costs Lawyers being able to apply for judicial posts, an ambition currently being pursued with government by the ACL and Costs Lawyer Standards Board. “A lot of us have got very senior positions and high levels of skills and knowledge. but the icing on the cake will be recognition of what a Costs Lawyer offers by being a judge. That will bestow a great legacy to the next generation.”