Andrew Allen obtains £40,000 costs award against barrister

Andrew Allen successfully represented the clerks and members of a set of barristers’ chambers against a claim of race discrimination brought by a barrister relating to allocation of work over a three year period and the manner in which the chambers responded to a complaint.

All of the claims were rejected in a judgment promulgated in April 2016.

At a costs hearing in November 2016, the unsuccessful Claimant was ordered to pay all of the Respondent’s legal costs, capped at £40,000 due to her means – given that she was over £100,000 in debt.

The basis for the costs decision was that the Claimant had behaved unreasonably in her conduct of the case which involved “untrue allegations of discriminatory conduct” and that the “entirely unmeritorious claim”, “which should never have been brought” was “doomed to fail from the start”.

News 18 Nov, 2016