So Will The Eu Tackle These Bottom Dwellers ?

[youngmafbog]

Plenty of you up in arms on Bankers bonuses as it is very fashionable amongst the right-on brigade but what about the pond life feeding peoples misery, aka Briefs?

Will we see the EU take action?

I suspect not since the whole political spectrum is riddled with their mates.

http://news.sky.com/story/1057994/divorce-couples-hit-by-hidden-costs

[FredPuli43]

Vanessa Lloyd-Platt gives the answer in the link. And it is an offence, against the solicitors' code of practice, not to give an estimate of costs before the case is undertaken, and a solicitor can be struck off the roll for committing it.

Divorce cases are capable of generating a lot of perfectly justified costs. Lay clients have a habit of texting, e-mailing, phoning, the solicitor on everything and anything , regardless of its significance, which runs up costs. And the very nature of the disputes, fuelled by anger and resentment, gives rise to a lot of correspondence and a lot of applications which would never arise in ordinary litigation. These may well drive up the costs to exceed any estimate quoted at the outset, though the costings per hour are given beforehand.

That said, solicitors ought a) to bill at frequent and regular intervals, with fully itemised bills b) remind clients, with those bills, that every e-mail etc costs.

[Barmaid]

I agree with Fred.

I love that old chestnut "lawyers feeding on other people's misery".

So if you have a burst pipe is the plumber feeding on misery?
If you crash your car is the repairing garage feeding on misery?
If your computer goes wrong.............
If you are ill.....

What action do you want the EU to take that the LSO can't already do?

[Buenchico]

£4000 for photocopying does seem a bit expensive though! Yes, I appreciate that staff time has to be taken into account, as well as the actual cost of copying, but our Local Record Office charges 65p per page for staff to copy material, while the British Library charges 56p. Taking 60p per page as a 'mid range' figure for a service charged at an economic rate would imply that the divorce proceedings generated over 6500 pages of photocopying.

Or looking at it another way, let's assume that there were 100 pages (which seems very high) to be photocopied, with 10 copies (again, probably high) to be made of each, and that the actual cost of each photocopy (paper + toner) was 10p (which also seems high). That's 1000 pages at 10p = £100. So £3900 was charged for labour. Assuming that the work was done by an administrative assistant working for, say, £12 per hour, that's 325 hours of labour needed to produce 1000 photocopies. So their photocopier must only be capable of making around 3 copies per hour. They clearly need a new photocopier (or a new administrative assistant!).

[jake-the-peg]

I don't think this is really a European issue - the legal systems are so diverse across Europe.

If you want to beat them into taking action on something might I suggest food traceability - that all seems to move about the continent like nobody's business.

If everybody tries to bring in their own seperate legislation it'd be chaos

Horses for courses! (er - I'll get me coat)

[FredPuli43]

Chris,if you think 100 pages of photocopying in a divorce case "seems a bit high", you have never been near one! 6,500 copies would be unusual but not exceptional. There are files full of financial statements for a start. Everything gets copied for counsel and parties in the case and you can have three ring binders of correspondence, and all manner of other documents.

But there's no doubt that timings can be abused. A letter which takes 10 minutes can be put down as an hour and there's often no way of knowing how many hours have actually been spent.