Glossary of common terms
Disbursements
This term refers to the expenses incurred or paid by a lawyer to other persons as part of conducting your case. The most common examples of disbursements are report fees paid to medical practitioners, Court fees, expert witness fees, barristers' fees, process service fees, photocopying fees etc. If your matter is successful and you receive an order of costs in your favour, many of the disbursement costs will be refunded to you.
 
Legal Costs

This term refers to the total charged for legal services. It includes the lawyers own professional fees for the work performed together with disbursements paid or payable to third parties. There can be various components to legal costs. These include a contribution to your legal costs from party/party costs or ministerial allowances.

 
Party/Party costs
This term refers to costs that are often (but not always) payable by one party to another party. An unsuccessful party usually pays them to the successful party. The payment and calculation of these costs are governed by complex court rules and are generally calculated on Court scales. An order to pay party/party costs is referred to as an adverse costs order.
 
Ministerial Allowance
This refers to an amount payable by WorkCover or a self-insurer under regulations made by the Minister for WorkCover. These allowances are a contribution to claimants’ legal costs for work involved in the preparation for a claim for permanent impairment or a successful application for serious injury certification. As court cases will not have been commenced in these claims party/party costs will not be payable.
 
Scale Costs
This term refers to a rate for legal costs to be charged when one party to another party in litigation is paying them to the other. Each court has developed its own scales. The scales of each court vary in accordance with the amount of compensation or damages involved in the case. Scale costs do not usually refund all of the legal costs someone has incurred. For example some legal work may have been performed which was not strictly necessary for the dispute between the parties. This differential is often referred to as Solicitor/Own client costs.
 
Solicitor /Own client costs
This term is used to refer to the amount of fees and disbursements actually payable by a client after the contribution from the other party or from a Ministerial Allowance is taken into account. It represents the gap in legal costs between the portion of those costs recoverable from another party and the amount payable by the client.
 
Conditional fee agreement
A conditional fee agreement is an arrangement where the client and his or her lawyer enter into an arrangement that all or some of that lawyers fees will not be payable by the client unless the claim is successful. The agreement should clearly set out the lawyer's obligations under the agreement.
 
Uplift fee
This is also referred to as a success fee. It refers to an increased fee rate in the event that the claim is successful. By law the increase in the fees be up to 25% of the fees and disbursements. This does not mean that a lawyer is able to claim 25% of your award. It merely means that the fees may be increased by that percentage. In the event that the claim is unsuccessful, the agreement may provide that the lawyer will forgo all or some of the fees and disbursements. This will depend on the exact arrangement that you negotiate with your lawyer.