R v Bhadresh Gohil

Assessment of criminal legal aid costs requires two distinct stages. First, the determining officer must assess the individual items, or use an appropriately explained sampling method where the volume of work makes a line-by-line assessment impracticable. Only then may the officer stand back and consider whether the aggregate is unreasonable under the approach in Singh. A global reduction cannot be justified as a Singh discount where the audit stage has been omitted. In exceptionally complex confiscation proceedings, the time reasonably required to understand and review extensive interconnected documentation may properly be allowed. A minutes-per-page guide is only a cross-check. Assessment must also consider the appropriate grade for the work, separately from any enhancement for exceptional circumstances.

Imran Khan & Partners appealed under regulation 29 of the Criminal Legal Aid (Remuneration) Regulations 2013 against reductions made by a determining officer in a claim for work undertaken in lengthy confiscation proceedings involving Bhadresh Gohil. The disputed work concerned documentation supplied by the defendant and a large confiscation bundle relating to Gohil and co-defendants. Further grounds concerned the grades at which particular solicitors’ work was remunerated.

The central issues were whether the determining officer had lawfully assessed the documentary work, whether a sampling or global approach was permissible, whether the time claimed was reasonable, and whether the work had been assigned to the appropriate fee-earner grades.

1. Appeal allowed. The reductions in respect of the defendant’s documents and the Ibori confiscation bundle could not stand. The court substituted allowances of 1,648 hours and 305.5 hours respectively.
2. The approach in R v Supreme Court Taxing Office ex parte John Singh & Co requires two stages. The determining officer must first conduct an audit of the individual items and establish the aggregate figure. The officer may then step back and decide whether the total is unreasonable. Both stages are important; they must not be elided by assessing a sample and directly imposing a global reduction under the guise of a Singh discount (paras 18–25, 30–31).
3. A sampling approach may nevertheless be appropriate in a claim containing thousands of entries. The determining officer may examine a proportion of a category in detail and extrapolate from it, using experience together with the evidence in the particular case. If challenged, the methodology must be explained and justified independently. R v Waite supported the distinction between sampling a large number of small items and the separate process of standing back after an item-by-item audit (paras 25–29).
4. The disputed documentation was relevant to the confiscation proceedings. The interrelationship between the defendants and the benefit claims justified detailed consideration of the material. The solicitor could not simply abdicate responsibility to the forensic accountant, and both solicitor and accountant might need to review the documents. The exceptional complexity and volume of the case meant that the time claimed was not obviously unreasonable (paras 32–47).
5. A minutes-per-page guide in the Criminal Bills Assessment Manual could be no more than a cross-check. The amount payable had to be assessed by reference to the work actually claimed and the documentation involved, rather than calculated mechanically by page count (paras 42–47).
6. The challenges to fee-earner grades failed. An enhancement for exceptional circumstances did not remove the requirement to assess the appropriate grade of person who did, or ought to have done, the work. The determining officer had properly reduced certain work to Grade B or Grade C where the nature of the task did not justify the higher grade (paras 48–55).

This was an appeal under regulation 29 of the Criminal Legal Aid (Remuneration) Regulations 2013 against the determining officer’s assessment of costs in confiscation proceedings. The appeal succeeded in relation to the two documentary-work reductions; the fee-earner grade challenge was rejected.