Two sets of rules decide how a clinical negligence bill is drawn, and they do not cover the same claims. A file can fall outside costs management entirely and still require an electronic bill. Getting that wrong is one of the easier ways to lose time at the start of detailed assessment.
The two regimes do not line up
Costs management under CPR 3.12 ordinarily excludes, among others, claims made by or on behalf of a person under 18 — which takes a great deal of birth injury and paediatric clinical negligence outside the ordinary regime, as we set out in our guide to clinical negligence costs budgets.
The electronic bill requirement in PD 47 paragraph 5.1 works on a different basis. A bill must be an electronic bill, complying with paragraphs 5.A1 to 5.A4, where:
- the case is a Part 7 multi-track claim, except
- cases in which the proceedings are subject to fixed costs or scale costs;
- cases in which the receiving party is unrepresented; or
- where the court has otherwise ordered; and
- the bill relates to costs recoverable between the parties for work undertaken after 6 April 2018 — the Transition Date.
A child claim is not among those exceptions. So the birth injury file that was never costs-managed may still require a Precedent S. The two questions have to be asked separately, and the answer to one does not determine the other.
Work spanning the Transition Date
Clinical negligence claims run long, and many straddle 6 April 2018. Paragraph 5.A4 deals with exactly that situation. Where a bill otherwise falls within paragraph 5.1(a) but work was done both before and after the Transition Date, a party may serve and file either a paper bill or an electronic bill in respect of work done before that date, and must serve and file an electronic bill in respect of work done after it.
Note what the test turns on. It is when the work was undertaken, not when the proceedings were issued. A claim issued in 2016 that ran on for years will have a substantial body of post-Transition work requiring an electronic bill, whatever its issue date.
What Precedent S actually requires
Paragraph 5.A1 identifies Precedent S as the model electronic bill, annexed to the Practice Direction in spreadsheet and PDF formats. It is a model, not the only permitted format.
Paragraph 5.A2 permits any other spreadsheet format, provided it satisfies five requirements. It must:
- report and aggregate costs based on the phases, tasks, activities and expenses defined in Schedule 2 to the Practice Direction;
- report summary totals in a form comparable to Precedent S;
- allow the user to identify, in chronological order, the detail of all the work undertaken in each phase;
- automatically recalculate intermediate and overall summary totals if the input data is changed; and
- contain all calculations and reference formulae in a transparent manner, so as to make its full functionality available to the court and all other parties.
The last two are the ones most often missed. A bill exported to a flat spreadsheet, with totals typed rather than calculated and the working stripped out, satisfies neither — however tidy it looks on the page.
Serving and filing: both formats are required
Paragraph 5.1A is easy to overlook and awkward to remedy late. Whenever electronic bills are served or filed at court they must be served or filed in hard copy, in a manageable paper format as shown in the PDF version of Precedent S — and a copy of the full electronic spreadsheet version must at the same time be provided to the paying party, or filed at court, by email or other electronic means.
Serving the PDF alone is not compliance. Nor is emailing the spreadsheet without the paper format.
Paper-bill provisions still apply
Paragraph 5.A3 applies paragraphs 5.7 to 5.21 to electronic bills insofar as they are not inconsistent with the form and content of Precedent S. Where those paragraphs require or recommend division of the bill into parts, an electronic bill should incorporate a summary comparable to the Funding and Parts Table in Precedent S to provide the information that division into parts would otherwise give.
Outside the mandatory circumstances, bills may be electronic or on paper. Precedents A, B, C and D in the Schedule of Costs Precedents are the model paper bills.
Phase coding on an expert-heavy clinical negligence claim
The safest approach is to allocate work according to why it was undertaken, rather than simply who performed it. Clinical negligence claims make this particularly important, because the same solicitors, counsel and experts may be involved at different stages for very different purposes.
Pre-action expert and medical-record work should remain identifiable as pre-action work where that reflects the purpose and stage at which it was undertaken. Once proceedings are underway, expert work should be coded consistently according to the applicable phase, task and activity structure.
A conference involving counsel and experts should not automatically be placed in Expert Reports simply because experts attended. Its correct treatment depends upon the purpose of the conference.
The same principle applies to medical records. Obtaining records, collating them, indexing them, reviewing them, supplying them to experts and considering expert evidence arising from them are not necessarily the same activity.
Clinical negligence bills become unnecessarily vulnerable where large bodies of expert or records work appear across several phases without a clear and consistent explanation.
Where paying parties are likely to push on clinical negligence bills
On an expert-heavy clinical negligence bill, particular scrutiny is likely to fall on:
- duplication between solicitor, counsel and experts;
- seniority and delegation;
- time spent reviewing substantial quantities of medical records;
- the number and necessity of expert disciplines;
- supplementary expert reports;
- conferences involving counsel and experts;
- expert and counsel fees;
- repeated consideration of the same evidence;
- proportionality; and
- any divergence between the Bill of Costs and an approved or agreed budget.
That does not mean those costs are necessarily unreasonable or irrecoverable. It means the bill should show why the work was necessary. The fact that the claim involved clinical negligence is not, by itself, an explanation for every item of expenditure.
The strongest bill is one where the chronology, expert evidence, phase coding and narrative all tell the same story.
Reading the bill against the budget
Where the matter was costs-managed, the bill needs to be capable of comparison against the approved or agreed budget phase by phase, because that is how it will be read. CPR 3.18 means the court will not depart from approved or agreed budgeted costs without good reason, so a bill whose phases cannot be lined up against the budget makes its own case harder.
Where there was no costs-managed budget — the child claims above — there is no approved budget to reconcile against, and the reasonableness and proportionality case has to be presented without that reference point. That is a drafting question, and it is the main reason unbudgeted clinical files need more from the bill rather than less.
A practical checklist
- Ask the electronic-bill question separately from the costs-management question.
- Check the claim against PD 47 paragraph 5.1 — Part 7 multi-track, and none of the three exceptions.
- Identify work done before and after 6 April 2018 and apply paragraph 5.A4 to the split.
- If using a format other than Precedent S, confirm it satisfies all five requirements in 5.A2, including transparent formulae.
- Serve both the manageable paper format and the full spreadsheet, as 5.1A requires.
- Allocate work by why it was undertaken, and be able to explain the allocation.
- Where there was a budget, make the bill readable against it phase by phase.
- Where there was none, put the proportionality case in the narrative.
DMD Costs prepares clinical negligence bills of costs for claimant solicitor firms — Precedent S electronic bills, paper bills where they remain appropriate, phase and task coding, and the bill of costs drafting that follows a settled claim.
Rules cited: Practice Direction 47 paragraph 5.1 (when an electronic bill is mandatory), paragraph 5.1A (service and filing), paragraphs 5.A1 to 5.A4 (Precedent S, permitted formats, application of the paper-bill provisions, and work spanning the Transition Date), the paper-bill provisions at paragraphs 5.7 to 5.21, and Schedule 2. Checked 18 August 2026. This guide is general information for professional readers and is not advice on any particular claim.