It "could not be just" that a losing litigant is forced by the laws of the State to pay an hourly rate for an opponent's lawyers at a rate that is multiples of the around €200 per hour the Taoiseach is paid, a High Court judge said.
Mr Justice Michael Twomey said “transparency demands” that a losing litigant, who must pay High Court costs, is entitled to know lawyers’ hourly rates which were used in the calculation of that obligation.
He made the comments when he once again highlighted what he called "millionaire" legal costs in the High Court in a case in which a developer is suing two women in a row over plans for new houses next to Inchanappa House in Ashford, Co Wicklow.
Developer Greg Kavanagh's Beakonford Ltd has sued Inchanappa House owner Oonagh Stokes and local woman Barbara Wilding claiming there was an attempt to extract a payment of €6 million from the company as part of an objection lodged against the planning application.
Planning permission was eventually granted for 98 homes on land formerly part of Inchanappa Estate and bought by Beakonford for €4 million.
The defendants strongly deny the claims.
In advance of the hearing of the case, the defendants sought that Beakonford put up security for costs should it lose the action. The defendants argued the company could not properly show it had the money to pay costs, which the company disputed.
The court ordered that security should be provided. To help the court assess what the amount of the security should be, three legal costs accountants provided estimates.
One was provided by Lowes for some €250,000 on behalf of Beakonford, another was provided by McCann Sadlier on behalf of Ms Stokes for around €411,000. A third, on behalf of Ms Wilding, was provided by Peter Fitzpatrick Legal Costs Accounts in the sum of around €454,000.
Mr Justice Twomey said the court favoured the lower figure provided by Beakonford.
The judge said in all three cost accountants' reports, there were no hourly rates provided for the work that lawyers would carry out on the case.
In the Fitzpatrick estimate, he said a figure of €170,000 (excluding VAT) was provided for work by the solicitors (excluding barristers) for costs in preparing and attending what is due to be a six day trial of the case. But this was "without the court having any idea” of how much time the legal practitioner was estimated to expend on the case, he said.
If the legal practitioner worked for 170 hours - the equivalent to working full time for a month on this case alone at a rate of €1,000 per hour - this would in an "inordinate" rate and could not be viewed as reasonable, the judge said.
He pointed out the Taoiseach - holder of the most important office in the country - earns €241,480 per annum.
Based on a 40-hour week this equates to an hourly rate of around €200, excluding pensions and benefits which he noted are not paid to self employed lawyers.
The court was being asked, he said, to approve costs without knowing whether it is based on the lawyer being paid at rates roughly around what the Taoiseach is paid or whether it is "many multiples" of that (where the rate is €1,000 per hour).
Under the Legal Services Regulation Act 2015, costs are required to be "reasonable" which can be done by applying hourly rates, he said.
But where costs adjudicated by the State-operated Legal Costs Adjudicator are, in practice, "anything but reasonable since they are at 'millionaire' levels", this is a conflict which requires consideration by the court, he said.

A security for costs application is one of the few occasions in which the courts have any insight to how costs are calculated, even though costs are an integral part of the administration of justice as they often exceed the damages awarded, he said.
As a result, the judiciary, with no control over the level of litigation costs, has repeatedly complained, but without success, about the high costs of litigation in the High Court for at least 60 years, he said.
He also said if he directed the costs accountants to produce new reports based on hours worked that would simply add further to the costs of this case.
Accordingly, the court has adopted the Lowes’ estimate of €250,000, even though it cannot definitively say that this estimate is “reasonable”, he said.