Form H as LiP

Morning All

Just completing my Form H in advance of the Final Hearing.

I have read that I can put down any time I have spent as a LiP on my Form H, currently at £19 per hour (According to the Rule 46.5, section 3.4)

I have already put down the costs for legal advice I have received.

Which section on the form do i put my estimated costs into?

Technically the Form H is to record costs you have expended and unpaid costs which may be considered a debt for the purposes of calculating your liabilities.

In that respect there is nowhere on the form to put LIP costs which is very different from claiming costs as a litigant in person in a costs-bearing application e.g. divorce or injunction.

Charles

Thanks Charles

However, I need to reflect somewhere that I have spent > 100 hours of my time on this case so far. Plus 2.5 days off work for hearings etc.

I don't want at the final hearing, her moaning about her high costs (Likely to be 13k) whereas mine are £1,500.

I would rather mine reflected the actual time and work I have had to put into this.

Your costs are free as you do not pay yourself a wage. If you were to put your own costs in you would also have to say what has been paid towards them. Any answer you would put would be incorrect i.e. you have not paid yourself anything and you do not owe yourself anything.

You ex chose to instruct lawyers and you could have done so too. The fact that you didn't will make a saving on the matrimonial pot which will benefit you and your ex.

Charles

how about 2.5 days off work to attend hearings?

Is my time really worthless?

I gave an updated Form H to the judge at each of the main hearings.

In the disbursements row I included things such as travel/accommodation costs (as my hearing was over 200 miles from home), stamps, photocopying costs, books that I had bought and a subscription to family law hub.

In the solicitors row I put my hours x LIP rate. I backed it all up with a spreadsheet which itemised it all, setting out, for example, that I may have spent 5 hours writing a particular document.

I probably only claimed for a small fraction of my research, and cut down quite a bit on the documents. So if, for example I spent 20 hours writing a witness statement I only claimed for 5 hours. This was to keep the costs proportionate.

By my final hearing my costs were approx £5k, of which £2k were disbursements which I had actually paid out.

It is all pretty academic though as costs are rarely awarded (though my judge hinted that I could have requested costs as there was a clear case of litigation misconduct from my ex).

She looked through my Form H and the spreadsheet and didn't raise any issues with the LIP rate being used.

The purpose of the Form H is to inform the court of legal costs that have been incurred and which remain outstanding. The former is for research into average cost of case and the latter is to show the current liability which would be above and beyond that shown on the form E.

In the event that a person wanted to claim costs from another party they would have to complete a N260 statement of costs which is a different form entirely.

The Form H is not a claim for costs - it is an estimate. No more, no less.

If a matter proceeds to final hearing the estimate of costs becomes more important as a tool to tweak the settlement imposed upon the parties by the court. This is why the court required Form H1 which is the extended version of the Form H.

Litigants in person are not expected to complete the Form H as it is mostly meaningless when a solicitor files it and even more meaningless when a litigant in person completes one. It's one of the many paper-pushing exercise that doesn't effect 99% of cases.

Charles

Charles