Two of the most closely watched disputes about agency fees are heading to the Court of Appeal within 48 hours of each other. The Case Tracker currently lists JXX v Archibald and others for 16 March 2027 and Motor Insurers’ Bureau v Santiago for 18 March 2027, each estimated at about four and a half hours.
The cases are not the same. They arise from different facts, different courts and different costs regimes. But they turn on one shared problem: where a third-party agency sits between the solicitor and the person actually doing the work, how much of the agency’s charge is recoverable between the parties, and how much has to be disclosed to justify it?
That question has produced years of inconsistent first instance decisions. March 2027 is the first realistic opportunity for authoritative guidance.
The two listings
| Appeal | Reference | Listed | Issue beneath the appeal |
|---|---|---|---|
| JXX v Archibald and others | CA-2026-001148 | 16 March 2027 | Recoverability and assessment of Medical Reporting Organisation fees |
| Motor Insurers’ Bureau v Santiago | CA-2026-000549 | 18 March 2027 | Agency charges, breakdowns and reasonable disbursement recovery |
Both are presently estimated at approximately four hours thirty minutes. The Court of Appeal Case Tracker is an official listing service, but HMCTS is explicit that listings are provided for convenience and that hearing dates and constitutions can change. Treat the dates above as the position at the time of writing rather than a fixture. We will update this page if either listing moves, and again when judgment is handed down.
Why JXX v Archibald matters
The decision under appeal is the conjoined SCCO judgment in JXX v Archibald and HLA v LXA [2026] EWHC 630 (SCCO), in which Senior Costs Judge Rowley considered charges made by Medical Reporting Organisations.
The dispute was never about whether the underlying medical expert could be paid. It was about the agency element added on top — and the judgment followed detailed evidence about how the medical reporting market actually operates, including mark-ups well above the fees charged by the experts themselves.
Two findings came out of it, and they cut in opposite directions.
The MRO won the classification point
The court held that MRO charges are properly treated as disbursements, not outsourced solicitors’ work. That mattered because it removed the argument that an MRO must produce the sort of time-and-rate breakdown expected when solicitor work is claimed in a Bill of Costs.
The paying parties won on quantum
Senior Costs Judge Rowley did not accept that an MRO could charge whatever percentage it liked. On the evidence before him he concluded that a maximum recoverable mark-up of 25% of the expert fee was reasonable — against reported commercial mark-ups substantially higher than that.
The result was a compromise: recoverable in principle, but materially restricted in amount. Our full analysis of that decision is in our note on JXX v Archibald and the 25% recoverable mark-up.
There were two JXX decisions, not one
This is worth getting right, because the case name alone is ambiguous and the two decisions do not say the same thing.
In JXX v Scott Archibald [2025] EWHC 69 (SCCO), handed down on 17 January 2025, Costs Judge Rowley put the receiving party to an election: provide the requested information separating the expert’s fee from the MRO’s charge and have the composite invoice assessed on both elements, or decline — and have the fees assessed as though only the expert had been involved. Without evidence justifying the MRO element, a composite invoice was likely to be reduced.
The 2026 conjoined judgment, by the same judge now sitting as Senior Costs Judge, reached the classification point squarely and held that a solicitor-style breakdown is not required at all, substituting a percentage ceiling for the breakdown requirement.
So the trajectory of the case law within a single year moved from “break it down or be assessed as if the agency did nothing” to “no breakdown needed, but 25% is the ceiling”. That movement is itself part of why an appeal was always likely — and why quoting “JXX” without saying which decision you mean is a good way to lose an argument.
Why an appeal was always likely
The judge himself recognised that the issue needed authoritative resolution. The medical reporting market is commercially significant and the question affects large volumes of personal injury and clinical negligence litigation.
The consequences run in both directions:
- for paying parties, unrestricted percentage mark-ups could materially inflate recoverable disbursements across whole books of claims;
- for claimant firms and MROs, a rigid ceiling opens a gap between what the agency charges the solicitor and what the solicitor can recover from the paying party.
That gap does not disappear. Someone absorbs it — which is why the appeal matters well beyond the two bills that produced it.
Then Santiago, two days later
The second listing is Motor Insurers’ Bureau v Santiago. The decision under appeal is Motor Insurers’ Bureau v Raphael De Lima Santiago [2026] EWHC 513 (KB), a judgment of Mr Justice Moody given on 19 February 2026.
The claimant’s solicitors claimed £924 for Portuguese interpretation at trial, invoiced through an agency. The MIB argued that the invoice had to be broken down so the court could see what reached the interpreter and what the agency retained, and that only the former was a genuine disbursement.
Moody J rejected that. He held there is no rule of law or practice requiring a breakdown in every case, and distinguished profit costs — which engage the solicitor’s own responsibility — from disbursements. Interpretation obtained through an intermediary remained a legitimate disbursement, comparable in kind to an expert’s fee.
The connected-agency point
One feature deserves emphasis, because paying parties raise it constantly. The agency was a related company, sharing ownership with the claimant’s solicitors. That did not change the analysis. Common ownership between firm and agency was not, by itself, a reason to treat the charge as anything other than a disbursement.
The appeal was dismissed. The figure assessed below — £794.40, the mean of the market quotations in evidence — was upheld as reasonable and proportionate. That is the shape of the reasoning worth noting: the measure was the reasonable market cost of obtaining the service, not the sum the individual supplier would have charged directly.
Santiago is not an MRO case
This distinction matters and it is regularly blurred. Santiago concerned an interpreter agency in a fixed costs context, not a Medical Reporting Organisation in an inter partes assessment. It would be unsafe to say that Santiago has already settled the law on medical agency fees. It has not.
But the reasoning raises the obvious wider question. If a recoverable disbursement is measured by the reasonable market cost of obtaining the service, why must the receiving party always reveal what was passed to the individual supplier? That principle has clear parallels with the medical agency debate, which is why the case is being read well beyond interpreter fees.
Similar, but not the same
At a high level both appeals involve the same anatomy:
- an underlying professional or service-provider fee;
- an intermediary agency;
- an additional agency element;
- a paying party asking what exactly it is reimbursing;
- a request for greater transparency or a breakdown; and
- the question of what constitutes a reasonable recoverable disbursement.
The differences are just as real:
| JXX / HLA | Santiago | |
|---|---|---|
| Intermediary | Medical Reporting Organisation | Interpreter agency |
| Court | Senior Courts Costs Office | High Court, King’s Bench Division |
| Context | Inter partes detailed assessment | Fixed costs |
| Sums at stake | Substantial expert expenditure | Comparatively small, but a point of principle |
| Evidence base | Extensive material on MRO business models and mark-ups | Market quotations for the service |
The Court of Appeal does not have to give the same answer in both.
What the Court of Appeal could decide
It could give a narrow decision confined to the particular rules and evidence in each appeal, or address the wider principles governing intermediary charges. The questions available to it include:
- Is the agency charge itself a recoverable disbursement?
- When can a paying party require disclosure of the underlying provider’s fee?
- Must a receiving party split an agency invoice into provider fee and agency fee?
- Should agency charges be tested against the actual provider cost, against market evidence, or against some other benchmark?
- Can a percentage mark-up be adopted as a practical method of assessment at all?
- If so, is 25% the right ceiling?
- Does the answer differ between medical agencies, interpreter agencies and other intermediaries?
Those are precisely the questions that have generated satellite litigation for years.
Is the 25% figure binding now?
This needs care in correspondence.
The SCCO decision is important, but it is a first instance assessment of reasonableness on the evidence in those particular cases. It is not a Court of Appeal authority and it is not a tariff written into the CPR. Until the appeal is decided, neither side should argue as though the Civil Procedure Rule Committee had enacted a universal 25% rule.
The pending appeal makes that distinction more important, not less. A Bill or a Point of Dispute that overstates the status of the authority invites the other side to correct it — and having been corrected on the law once, you are less persuasive on everything after it.
What claimant firms should do before March 2027
The appeals are months away. Bills are being drawn and assessed now. A practical approach is still needed.
1. Keep the underlying evidence
Retain the expert’s fee note where available, the MRO invoice, the VAT treatment, the terms on which the MRO was instructed, and anything explaining an unusual or particularly high agency charge.
2. Understand the agency element even where you need not disclose it
The current authorities do not require a solicitor-style breakdown. That is not a reason to be ignorant of the composition of your own invoice. If a proportionality or reasonableness challenge arrives, you need to know what you are defending.
3. Calculate the percentage
Where the information is available, express the agency element as a percentage of the underlying expert charge. A mark-up materially above 25% will attract scrutiny, and it is better to know that before the Points of Dispute arrive than after.
4. Do not concede the whole agency fee
JXX did not hold that MRO charges are irrecoverable — the opposite. The court accepted the charge as a disbursement and rejected the argument that it had to be treated as outsourced solicitor time.
5. Do not accept that no breakdown means nil
That was the other extreme, and it did not succeed either. The exercise remains an assessment of what is reasonable. Where hourly rates are also in issue, the same evidence-led approach applies — see our guide to the 2026 Guideline Hourly Rates.
What paying parties should do
JXX gives paying parties a real argument where a mark-up materially exceeds the underlying expert fee. But the argument has to be evidenced. A properly particularised challenge identifies:
- the expert fee;
- the agency charge, where known;
- the resulting percentage uplift;
- why the total is said to be unreasonable;
- any comparable market evidence; and
- the current authorities, described accurately.
“Agency fee not recoverable. Reduce to nil.” is a weaker point than it looks, and both JXX and Santiago are now authority against it.
What the paying party is actually buying
Underneath all of this sits a deceptively simple question.
An expert charges an MRO £1,000. The MRO charges the solicitor £1,500. What is the paying party being asked to reimburse?
- the expert’s £1,000, plus £500 for a genuine additional service the MRO supplied; or
- the expert’s £1,000, plus £500 of commercial margin.
That is why classification matters. If the MRO performs a separate service whose reasonable cost is properly incurred in the litigation, there is a coherent case for recovery. But recoverability in principle does not make any price reasonable. The 25% approach was an attempt to hold both propositions at once. The Court of Appeal may now decide whether that compromise survives.
Why the same week matters
Two days apart does not mean the same constitution, a joined hearing, or one judgment governing the other. It does not even mean both will be heard when currently listed.
It does mean the Court of Appeal may be considering two closely related disputes about agency charges within a single week — and for practitioners who have spent years arguing about medical agency invoices, expert fee notes and requested breakdowns, that is the most promising development in the area for some time.
The DMD Costs view
The useful development is not that JXX is being appealed. It is the combination. JXX asks the court to confront the commercial reality of the modern medical reporting market. Santiago raises the broader question of how an intermediary charge should be assessed and whether the underlying supplier’s cost must be exposed at all. Together they give the Court of Appeal an unusually good opportunity to bring certainty to an area that has produced inconsistent first instance decisions and repeated satellite disputes.
Until then, neither slogan is safe:
- “25% is always the cap.”
- “No breakdown means no recovery.”
The assessment remains fact-sensitive, and the precise scope of the existing authorities is doing more work than either slogan admits.
If you have an MRO or expert fee issue in a bill, the Bill and its supporting evidence need to reflect the authorities accurately rather than lean on a blanket percentage or a generic description. See our costs drafting and recovery services, or send us the papers and we will review the position.
Sources: Court of Appeal Case Tracker listings for CA-2026-001148 and CA-2026-000549, current at the date of writing and subject to change; JXX v Archibald and HLA v LXA [2026] EWHC 630 (SCCO), Senior Costs Judge Rowley; JXX v Scott Archibald [2025] EWHC 69 (SCCO), Costs Judge Rowley, 17 January 2025; and Motor Insurers’ Bureau v Raphael De Lima Santiago [2026] EWHC 513 (KB), Moody J, 19 February 2026.