DEFENDING one's good name can be an expensive business. Mr Albert Reynolds won his action against the Sunday Times but, because he was awarded only a penny damages, far short of the sum of £5,005 which had been lodged, he may have to pay about £800,000 in costs.
Mr De Rossa neither won nor lost, as the jury failed to reach a verdict, but he could be left with' his costs for the second action. His costs for the first case, which was aborted, were paid by the Sunday Independent.
The costs of a libel action which goes to court depend on the complexity of the case, but they are likely to run to a six-figure sum. The first expense is the instruction fee for the solicitor - the payment for all the work done up to the day the trial starts.
This is based on the time spent on the case. Many of the bigger firms of solicitors have computerised time-recording, which records every minute spent by a solicitor on a client's case. In smaller solicitors' offices, the fee would still be calculated on "the weight of the file", according to a solicitor who deals with defamation.
An instruction fee of about £70,000 would be likely in a case like the De Rossa one. That is just for the solicitors in the case; barristers then have to be briefed. In a big case like the De Rossa one there are two senior and one junior counsel for each side. They have to prepare the case before it goes to court, for which they are paid a briefing fee.
A senior counsel would normally charge about £25,000 for preparing such a case.
However, in this case the leading senior counsel were both at the very top of their profession, so the briefing fees could be double that. A junior counsel is paid two-thirds of the senior rate.
Both the solicitors and the barristers are then paid for each day they spend in court, after the first day. These are called refresher fees and cost between £2,000 and. £3,000 for senior counsel, two-thirds of that for a junior, and about £1,500 a day for the solicitor.
The first trial was abandoned on the eighth day, so there were seven days of refresher and solicitors' fees to pay, which would have run to about £60,000 in total for each side. That case would therefore have cost each side about £250,000.
When it was abandoned because of an article published in the Sunday Independent judged to be prejudicial, the newspaper was ordered to pay the costs of both sides.
The trial then reopened in fronts of a new jury and the same ground was gone over again. However, there were a number of court appearances in between relating to the publication of another article referring to the case in the Sunday Independent and to the discovery of documents. These involved five court appearances but the full legal teams would not have bee required in all of them.
While it was a new case, a lot of the work had already been done, so the instruction and briefing fees would have been much reduced. However, because of the new documents requested, there was more work before it opened, so there would have been some pre-trial costs.
The new trial ran for 14 days, so there were 13 days of refresher and solicitors' fees, on top of the costs of the days in court between the trials. The second trial would therefore have cost at least as much as the first.
Lawyers for the two sides are in court today to discuss the payment of costs.