Free Traffic Legal Advice

Your daughter is still the defendant in the matter. She is not counterclaiming. She is requesting a costs order against the claimant for unreasonable behaviour.

You could try and get that fee paid by CEL I suppose as part of the application. It's your call - the risk here is that you turn a win (CEL abandoning the case) into a financial loss.

I was meaning that you could ask that the court award the N244 costs alongside your costs.

But I think you're wise to take the win.

The reason it was mentioned as an option is that it can work - see this recent success here.

If you win, then you get the N244 costs back as part of your costs. The risk of course is that if you do not succeed, you're down the court fee. Whether you do it depends on your appetite for risk. It potentially makes less sense when your costs are so low.

In response to your questions:

• The attitude different judges take to different issues can be hard to predict. In theory, your costs are your costs, and modest costs that you can clearly justify are more likely to be considered reasonable than obviously inflated costs.
• The claimant, for whom DCB Legal were acting.

The key matter will be whether the conduct of the claimant (via their solicitors) passes the bar for unreasonable conduct. This bar is high by design (as the idea is that the small claims track involves very limited costs, presumably so that big firms with deep pockets can't use the threat of huge legal fees to bully defendants into submission). The key difference I can see between the case I linked to and your case, is that in the linked case, Moorside did not discontinue - instead, the claim was struck out by the judge for multiple examples of CPR breaches.

Unfortunately, my appetite for risk was just a tad too high this time:

https://ibb.co/27wKL96Y

Bummer.

I think that's the end of the line for this claim. On this occasion at least, they get away with it.