Costs budgets for the court, from spreadsheet to shared tool
A web tool for building, versioning and agreeing litigation costs budgets, built for the 2013 reforms and later rebuilt inside a client portal.
- 2013built for the costs-budgeting reforms
The client
A firm of legal-costs specialists who prepare costs budgets for solicitor firms.
The challenge
From April 2013, parties in many civil claims have had to file a costs budget (known as Precedent H): a forecast of what the case will cost, broken into stages such as disclosure, witness statements and trial. The court reviews it at an early hearing and approves or cuts each stage. Budgets go through many drafts between costs specialist, solicitor and client, and every change has to be traceable.
What we built
A web-based budgeting tool, ready for the new rules, that several firms could use:
- Budgets built from templated cost items and disbursements, stage by stage
- Versions for each stage of the case, and the court's decision recorded against every item
- A flowchart view of the case, read-only share links and an audit trail
- Spell-checking with legal and medical dictionaries
- A link to the firm's case-management system, so staff open a budget straight from the case
The rebuild
In 2018–19 we rebuilt the tool around the way the firm actually worked: a simple list of stages instead of a flowchart, automatic revisions after each editing session, side-by-side views of what changed, roll-back, running totals and breakdowns by grade. Every existing budget was migrated across. The new tool lives inside the firm's client portal, so solicitors can review budgets and comment on the assumptions, with every change tracked.
Keeping up with the rules
The court's budget form has changed several times since. The tool has followed each time, adding contingencies, split trials, budgets for liability only and VAT changes, and producing a Word or PDF summary ready to file.
Technical details
Generation 1 (2013–17): VB.NET ASP.NET MVC with Entity Framework Code First on SQL Server, multi-firm with impersonation and audit logging, and a WCF/SOAP API used by the desktop case-management system for user sync and deep links.
Generation 2 (2019): rebuilt into the client portal (ASP.NET MVC 5) on the shared Entity Framework 6 model. Data was migrated from the old database. It has an AJAX editor API (about 2,600 lines), HtmlDiff change logs for assumptions, and DocIO-generated Word/PDF summaries.
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