WHAT ARE THE APPROX COSTS OF GOING TO THE SUPREME COURT IN…

The main costs of legal proceedings is the cost of each parties lawyers (solicitors and barristers). Setting aside these costs the other main costs are the costs of having witnesses, especially expert witnesses attend to give evidence or to prepare reports.

How much such costs will be depends entirely on the nature of the trial and how much evidence needs to be given or prepared by expert witnesses and the types of experts required.

For instance a case about medical negligence will likely require the involvement of medical experts, which means doctors and specialist doctors, whose rates may vary from a few hundred dollars to up to a thousand dollars an hour. For a dispute about building practices, experts are likely to be engineers or builders, whose rates will typically be somewhat less, though still considerable.

The length of the trial also can drastically increase costs and is is often the case that even where an expert is only required to give a few hours evidence, they may charge for the time they spend at the court waiting to be called to give evidence, because it is not possible in advance to know exactly when the court will be ready to hear a particular expert's evidence.

Because every case is different, only a lawyer familiar with the details of the case and the exact issues in dispute will be able to give you a firm view as to the likely ultimate cost of such proceedings (even then, predicting a case's cost with great certainty is not possible, because many factors are not in the lawyers hands). Without a detailed understanding of what is in issue in your case I can say only that costs can vary from almost zero in cases which are strictly on legal points, to many hundreds of thousands of dollars for complex technical cases. Indeed in technical cases it is not unheard of for the cost of experts to exceed that of the lawyers.

In terms of trying to estimate the cost of your particular case I strongly suggest you think long and hard about what you need to prove in your case, and what experts you would need to engage and whether they will need to prepare detailed reports or not, and then consider how hotly disputed some of their findings might be. Very often experts evidence ends up being contested by your opponents experts resulting in a further exchange of expert reports and sometimes the hiring of ever more specialised experts to clarify or argue a particular point. When you have considered these issues and obtained some cost estimates from suitable experts you may be able to form a rough 'guestimate' as to the likely cost your case may have in non lawyer related fees.

I trust the above assists.

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Thank you and good luck.

Patrick