Data for Legal Fees in 2022

Freedom of information request reference no: 01.FOI.23.028396

I note you seek access to the following information:

Further to the attached FOI, please could you provide me with the same information for 2022? For the avoidance of doubt that will be:

1. External Costs - Counsel for 2022
2. External Costs - Professional Fees for 2022
3. Total settlement payments paid in 2022
4. External Costs - Counsel (civil claims only) for 2022
5. External Costs - Professional Fees (civil claims only) for 2022
6. Total number of civil claims made in 2022

Please could you also advise on the following:
1. Do settlement payments include all civil and public law claims? Please could you provide the annual settlement payments for
a) all civil claims for the years 2016 to 2022 and for
b) all public law claims for the years 2016 to 2022? I appreciate you may have provided me with most of
a) in previous FOIs - if you have, there's no need to repeat yourselves, I just want to check the settlement figures I've been given already for 2016 to 2021 cover all civil claims. If you cannot provide the public law claim amounts/disaggregate them from the total - that's fine, please just explain why

2. I understand that the settlement totals you've provided only include compensation paid to the other side either in settlement or as the result of a court order. Is that correct? Please could you also provide the annual amounts spent on paying the other side's legal costs for
a) civil claims and
b) public law claims for the years 2016 to 2022? If you cannot provide the public law claim amounts/disaggregate them from the total - that's fine, please just explain why

3. Do settlement payments include claims made against the Met by its own employees?

And lastly, please could you also provide the following:

1. In a previous FOI (01/FOI/22/026342) you wrote that: "Fee earners (lawyers and paralegals) are the only ones who record the time they spend working on each case. We can supply the total amount of time spent on the cases by those fee earners, but it is not possible to provide the cost of that time without calculating it using the Met’s Ready Reckoner." For the years 2016 to 2022, please could you provide me with the annual total time spent by
a) lawyers and
b) paralegals on
a) civil claims,
b) public law claims and
c) inquests and inquiries. If you can't disaggregate lawyers and paralegals, you can provide a total of their hours. If you can't disaggregate civil and public law work and inquests and inquiries, you can again provide a total or totals (e.g. 1) civil and 2) public including inquests)

2. The hourly rate commanded by a junior in-house paralegal (i.e. the lowest ranking paralegal)

3. Annual amounts spent on
a) External Counsel,
b) External Professional Fees,
c) paying the other side's costs, and
d) settlements for Inquests and Inquiries for the years 2016 to 2022. Please also provide the total number of Inquests and Inquiries cases the Met was involved in each year. If the requested amounts are included within the existing civil figures you've provided and/or the public law figures you will provide and cannot be disaggregated, that's fine, just please make it clear

4. Of the total number of civil claims the Met has deal with each year from 2016 to 2022, how many did it settle and lose? You can provide cases settled and lost as a total.

5. Of the total number of public law cases the Met has deal with each year from 2016 to 2022, how many did it settle and lose? Assuming you have the figures, you can provide cases settled and lost as a total.

6. Of the total number of inquest and inquires cases the Met has deal with each year from 2016 to 2022, how many did it settle and lose? Assuming you have the figures, you can provide cases settled and lost as a total.

For the avoidance of doubt, any time I ask for figures for the years 2016 to 2022, I want annual amounts so 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and not the total for those six years.

Decision

I have today decided to disclose the located information to you in full.

Please find below information pursuant to your request above.