CITATION: Lanteigne v. Lanteigne, 2016 ONSC 1514 COURT FILE NO.: Oshawa FC-15-0035 DATE: 2016-03-02
ONTARIO SUPERIOR COURT OF JUSTICE
BETWEEN
Joseph Mario Lanteigne
Applicant
- and -
Melissa Maria Lanteigne
Respondent
COUNSEL:
Applicant, acting in person
Lesley Taafe, for the respondent
HEARD: January 6, 2016
BEFORE: Timms J.
COSTS ENDORSEMENT
[1] Pursuant to my endorsement herein released on January 18, 2016, counsel for the applicant has now submitted a document labelled a bill of costs. The problem with that is that it contains no breakdown of time for particular events or actions. Thus, the court cannot weigh the factors in subrule 24(11) of the Family Law Rules.[^1]
[2] Counsel says that she spent a total of 24.68 hours preparing the 23C and performing all other work up to and including the oral hearing on January 6, 2016. I know that the matter took 1.34 hours in court on January 6, 2016. That leaves another 23.34 hours to be accounted for.
[3] From my endorsement of November 9, 2015, and my reasons for judgment, it should be obvious that much of the work done with respect to the 23C, and in preparation for the hearing, was both unhelpful and unnecessary with respect to the remedies that the applicant was seeking. Additionally, there was no need for an appearance on November 12, 2015, because I had already endorsed that an oral hearing was almost certainly required.
[4] In the absence of a better breakdown of counsel’s time, I am going to base my award of costs on ten hours work plus another two hours for the oral hearing. At $300.00 per hour, that comes to $3,600.00. To that will be added disbursements of $273.50, plus HST of $503.56. The total of those amounts is $4,377.06.
[5] I am not awarding any costs for the time included on the bill of costs for the law clerk employed by counsel. This court does not award costs for clerks’ or assistants’ time. I thought that by now my view of that would have become “common knowledge” in the Durham legal community. As I have written on many prior occasions, I endorse the reasoning of Justice H. Pierce of this court in the case of Beerthuizen v. West Arthur Place, where Her Honour said:
Except as authorized by the Rules of Civil Procedure or the jurisprudence, claims for a lawyer's staff fall under his hourly rate which contemplates overhead. Overhead includes staff. Counsel ought not to enhance his true hourly rate by hiving off overhead costs and charging staff time separately. This "pyramid technique" of claiming costs is not contemplated either by the rules or by the jurisprudence and can only serve to inflate a bill of costs beyond what is reasonable to recover from the opposing party.[^2]
[6] The amount of $4,377.06 is to be added to those amounts that I set out in paragraphs [16] and [17] of my endorsement of January 18, 2016. The final result is that the respondent it to receive $103,699.62 from the proceeds of the sale of the matrimonial home and the applicant is to receive $61,022.50. Ms. Taafe, who holds the proceeds from the sale in her trust account, is to distribute the funds accordingly.
The Honourable Mr. Justice Roger Timms
DATE RELEASED: March 2, 2016
[^1]: O. Reg. 114/99.
[^2]: 2008 CanLII 716 (ON SC), [2008] O. J. No. 110 (Ont. S.C.J.), at paragraph 16.