Legal-costs software, 25 years and counting
Case management, a bill-of-costs engine, court forms, costs budgets and a client portal, linked to solicitors' own systems and grown with the firm since 2001.
- 25 yearsand counting
- 2generations of bill engine
- Weeklyreleases
The client
A firm of legal-costs specialists who prepare, negotiate and settle legal costs for solicitor firms across England and Wales.
The challenge
When a court case ends, the winning side's legal costs have to be claimed in a bill of costs: an itemised, rule-bound document set out in court-prescribed forms. Costs specialists prepare these bills for solicitors, then negotiate them with the paying side's insurers. The rules, forms and rates change often, and every case starts as a pile of files, time records and email from someone else's system.
The firm needed software that fitted its process exactly, could take in work from its clients' systems, and could keep up every time the rules moved.
Case management built around costs work
The firm's staff work all day in a desktop system we built for them:
- Cases, diaries and deadlines, with working-day rules for court dates
- Solicitor firms, fee earners, insurers, negotiators and courts
- Offers, interim payments, settlements and invoicing
- Service-level agreements and compliance tracking for each client
- Configurable workflows that move each case through its stages
- Scheduling of bill drafters by capacity, week by week
A bill-of-costs engine that produces court-ready documents
Drafters build the bill by phase and fee earner, and the engine handles the arithmetic and the rules: hourly rates, VAT by date, success fees, insurance premiums, court fees, and the costs budget the court approved. At the press of a button it produces:
- Paper bills and schedules of costs
- The court's electronic bill spreadsheet (Precedent S)
- Court forms such as the N252, N254, N255, N258 and N260
- Budget comparisons, disbursement tables and profit-costs breakdowns
Taking in work from solicitors' own systems
Many of the firm's clients run their cases in a case-management system such as Proclaim or Legis. Instead of re-keying, those firms send their case files over electronically. Our software watches for new arrivals, alerts the team, and lets them review the full case history and documents before creating the case with the client, opponent and insurer details already filled in.
Firms can also send their time records as a spreadsheet. The software matches each entry to the right fee earner and court phase, so a draft bill takes shape in minutes rather than hours.
Email that files itself
Each incoming email is read for the firm's case number or the solicitor's, insurer's or negotiator's reference and filed to the right case automatically. Emails marked sensitive are left alone.
Costs budgets and a client portal
Since the 2013 reforms, many cases need a costs budget agreed at an early court hearing. We built a budgeting tool for this, and later rebuilt it inside a secure portal where solicitors see their cases and download documents, review and comment on budgets, sign off certificates and send new instructions.
Rebuilt, not replaced
The bill-of-costs engine has been through two complete generations, and the budgeting tool has been rebuilt too. Each time, the firm's existing bills, budgets and history came across with it. In 2019 we moved the whole system onto a new data foundation without stopping the business. The desktop software now updates itself, and the firm tests each release on a separate staging copy before it goes live.
The relationship
Since 2001 the rules have changed again and again: costs budgeting, the electronic bill, new forms, fixed costs for more types of case. Each time the system followed, usually with roughly weekly releases. Twenty-five years on, it is still in daily use.
Technical details
A Windows desktop application (VB.NET WinForms, .NET Framework 4.8, x64) and an ASP.NET MVC 5 client portal share one SQL Server database and an Entity Framework 6 Code First domain library (about 120 entities and over 200 migrations since the 2019 move from LINQ to SQL on the live database).
Pluggable external case-management importers: Proclaim XML exports (zipped, with a control file and documents) and an HTML case-listing format, delivered to per-firm FTP drop folders. A scheduled server task alerts staff, compresses and archives files. Excel time-ledger import uses fuzzy fee-earner matching and configurable phase, task and activity rules.
Court forms and the Precedent S spreadsheet are generated server-side from templates with Syncfusion DocIO and XlsIO, without Office installed. The bill engine has a caching calculation layer with unit tests, a version-agnostic document model, and a TCP messaging layer that pushes bill changes to other open clients.
Email-to-case matching is a standalone, unit-tested library driven by Outlook automation. The desktop app self-updates through Squirrel.Windows with Live and Staging channels. Source moved from TFVC to Git in 2025, with a C#/.NET 10 migration plan under way.
In more depth
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.
Cases that arrive ready to work on
Solicitor firms send their case files straight from Proclaim; the costs team reviews the history and opens a pre-filled case without re-keying.
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