Mannings Organisation Limited & Anor v Joseph Henry Manning

When assessing a payment on account of costs, the court must make a reasonable estimate of the likely recovery, allowing an appropriate margin for uncertainty. The assessment must reflect all relevant circumstances, including the difficulty of separating recoverable work from wider litigation costs and the imminence of detailed assessment.

Where costs cannot be precisely allocated between applications, the court may adopt a pragmatic, reasoned apportionment. The proportion should reflect the substance, seriousness and connection of the issues, rather than unreliable measures such as the relative length of written submissions.

The claimants had obtained an order requiring Joseph Senior to pay their costs of a discharge application. Their costs could not be satisfactorily separated from the wider litigation costs. They therefore provided a statement of total costs and proposed an apportionment.

The defendant contended that only a smaller proportion was attributable to the discharge application and that any payment on account should be substantially discounted. The court had to determine the costs reasonably attributable to the application and the reasonable sum payable before detailed assessment.

1. The court allowed 35% of the claimants’ total incurred costs as attributable to the discharge application, producing a figure of £57,874.44. The court made a pragmatic assessment because some work was safely attributable to the application while other work could not be separated.
2. The allocation had to reflect the seriousness of the allegations, the work required, and the connection between the discharge and injunction applications. Allocating costs by reference to the proportion of the defendant’s skeleton argument dealing with the discharge application was unreliable.
3. Under Civil Procedure Rules 1998, r 44.2(8), the payment on account had to be a reasonable sum. Applying the approach explained in Excalibur Ventures LLC v Texas Keystone Inc [2015] EWHC 566 (Comm), the court estimated the likely recovery and allowed for error.
4. The principal considerations were the difficulty of distinguishing the relevant costs from the broader litigation costs and the imminence of the expedited trial and detailed assessment. The likely recovery was assessed at between 65% and 75%, so the payment was fixed by reference to the lower figure, with a further allowance for estimation uncertainty.
5. Joseph Senior was ordered to pay £37,600 on account of the claimants’ costs by 4 p.m. on 6 July 2026.

First-instance decision on the amount payable on account of costs. The judgment was to be read with the judge’s earlier judgments in the same litigation, including [2026] EWHC 1160 (KB) and [2026] EWHC 1344 (KB).