Ignore Your Costs Budget at Your Peril! - Sharon Smith, John M Hayes
08/09/15. We suspect that there are not many who truly relish the whole notion of costs budgeting? But please fight the urge, once you have agreed your budget or had the court approve it, to bury it away in a dark cupboard and hope it will never see the light of day again!
In all seriousness, we would strenuously urge all of our clients, once a budget has been agreed/approved, to regularly refer back to it. Stick a copy to the front of the paper file as you would a legal aid funding certificate or, in the paperless era, set up a rolling diary prompt as a reminder to review the budget periodically. You need to be asking yourself at every stage, post-budget, do I have scope to be undertaking this work and/or do I have scope to incur this item of cost? If the answer is no then consideration should be given to amending the budget otherwise you run the risk of not recovering that element of the costs inter partes.
In the first instance you should submit your amended budget to...
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