Legal costs case law

BAILII is a wonderful, and free, resource and contains a section specifically devoted to recent costs law decisions.  These are usually mirrored in the excellent, free, Senior Courts Costs Office website transcripts section.  The downside with these sites is that the first does not provide case summaries and the second provides summaries for some cases but in another part of the website and those are not linked to the full judgments.  Further, with neither of these sites is there a way to obtain notification of new decisions.

Lawtel is a subscription service.  It does provide cases summaries and has some interesting decisions not reported elsewhere.  However, this service suffers from two problems (I am not talking now about their bizarre pricing structure).  It has a very useful daily update service that notifies of relevant new court decisions.  Unfortunately, the updates only seem to include recent decisions as opposed to older cases that have only just been added to Lawtel's database.  Therefore, even if one subscribes to the updates, one can miss important and interesting decisions.  The only way to make sure that other cases have not been reported is to search through the whole database.

The second problem with Lawtel is that it does not report many of the cases that appear on the Senior Courts Costs Office site.  One is therefore stuck with having to visit that site on a regular basis to check for new cases and to skim read them to know what the case is about.

Surely there could be a one-stop solution to keeping up to speed on all costs decisions.  Sadly, time constraints do not enable me to offer such a service.  There is a ray of hope on the horizon to this problem and I'll provide more information on this shortly.