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A long-running costs dispute between a personal injury firm and its former client has gone from $111,000 to $31,000 and back again – and is now headed for yet another review.
A showdown between Mavrakis & Associates Lawyers and Connor Malouf over a $152,801.90 legal bill, once described as a “sorry saga of costs”, will be reviewed for the fourth time by order of Justice Anthony Payne, Justice Michael Ball, and acting Judge John Griffiths.
The legal bill was first reduced to $111,274.56 by an assessor following Mavrakis & Associates Lawyers’ termination of its retainer with Malouf, who had brought the proceedings on his son’s behalf.
A review of the certificate of determination saw that sum decreased to $31,158,63, with the panel having found Mavrakis & Associates Lawyers did not comply with disclosure obligations and failed to contract out of provisions limiting costs for personal injury matters.
District Court’s Judge Robert Weber SC restored the assessor’s determination, having determined the review panel was “clearly erroneous” to have found Mavrakis & Associates Lawyers’ costs to be nil when the underlying litigation had yet to be resolved.
The NSW Court of Appeal ordered the District Court to conduct a rehearing and, in doing so, “consider for itself the question of whether the costs are fair and reasonable”, having regard to matters referred to in the Legal Profession Uniform Law (NSW) (LPUL).
“The primary judge did not do that,” Justice Payne, Justice Ball, and acting Judge Griffiths said in a decision published on Friday, 28 August.
On the bench’s interpretation, Judge Weber concluded schedule one of the Legal Profession Uniform Law Application Act 2014 (NSW) did not apply and the assessment of costs was unaffected by any failure to comply with disclosure obligations imposed by the LPUL, “other than that the presumption that the fees are reasonable are lost”.
“His Honour simply accepted the cost assessor’s assessment because of the ‘benefits which costs assessors enjoy over the court’.
“That is not what section 89 of the LPULAA required or permitted him to do,” Justice Payne, Justice Ball, and acting Judge Griffiths said.
This error was “jurisdictional”, the bench added.
If Justice Weber had undertaken his own assessment of the reasonableness of the costs, the bench found it would have been necessary for him to consider the matters referred to by the review panel as reasons why it would have substituted a lower determination of costs than those reached by the original assessor.
“There is a realistic possibility that on consideration of those matters, the primary judge would have agreed with some or all of the views expressed by the Review Panel,” the bench said.
Citation: Malouf v Mavrakis t/as Mavrakis & Associates Lawyers (No 2) [2026] NSWCA 176.
