R v Mafune: full special preparation fee restored in phone download costs appeal

The Senior Courts Costs Office has allowed in full a litigator's claim for 342 hours and 36 minutes of special preparation spent reviewing telephone download material, holding that the Legal Aid Agency's determining officer had misread the basis on which the claim was advanced.

In R v Mafune [2026] EWHC 2246 (SCCO), handed down on 28 August 2026, Costs Judge Leonard allowed an appeal by Kamrans Solicitors under Regulation 29 of the Criminal Legal Aid (Remuneration) Regulations 2013, together with £500 in costs, exclusive of VAT, and the £100 appeal fee.

The firm acted for a defendant prosecuted at Leeds Crown Court over the supply of Class A and Class B drugs alongside a co-defendant. Police seized an iPhone and a Samsung handset, and the Crown relied on messaging extracts from both. Comprehensive download reports covering the full contents of each device were served in spreadsheet format alone. The defendant admitted supplying Class B drugs but denied acting jointly with his co-defendant and denied supplying cocaine, maintaining that analysis of the messages would bear him out. He later admitted cocaine supply over a shorter period than the Crown had alleged, a narrowing the data itself was said to demonstrate.

The non-electronic page count was 871. With the two downloads, the total exceeded the 10,000 page cap on pages of prosecution evidence, and the graduated fee was calculated on the capped figure, meaning 9,129 pages of electronic material were absorbed into it. The claim in issue concerned the work done on the excess under paragraph 20(1)(b) of Schedule 2.

Where the determining officer went wrong

The determining officer proceeded on the footing that paragraph 20(3) permits payment only for hours reasonably required to review non-PPE electronic exhibits, and that where part of a body of electronic evidence had been admitted to the PPE count, none of it could support a special preparation claim. Sixty hours were allowed for reviewing residual content.

Costs Judge Leonard said he had difficulty understanding the logic of that approach, observing that paragraph 20(1)(b) appeared to have been overlooked. The claim had never been advanced as one for non-PPE residual material. Some of the electronic evidence would inevitably have been counted towards the graduated fee up to the cap; the purpose of paragraph 20(1)(b) is to remunerate the work reasonably required on everything beyond it.

Counting pages in a spreadsheet

The judgement restates the familiar trio of authorities. In Lord Chancellor v SVS Solicitors [2017] EWHC 1045 (QB), Holroyde J, as he then was, identified central importance to the trial, rather than mere helpfulness to the defence, as the criterion for inclusion. In Lord Chancellor v Edward Hayes LLP [2017] EWHC 138 (QB), underlying messaging data had to be examined to test the veracity and context of the messages relied upon. Lord Chancellor v Lam and Meerbux Solicitors [2023] EWHC 1186 (KB) supports a sensible approximation where a printout throws up blank pages, fragments and plainly irrelevant material.

Applying basic filtering to strip out empty messages and irrelevant entries, the judge arrived at 61,800 pages of chat data on the iPhone download and 4,512 pages on the Samsung, a combined 66,312. Deducting the 9,129 pages already inside the count left 57,183 pages of excess evidence. Although special preparation is paid for time reasonably spent rather than by the page, the judge noted as a cross-check that the claim equated to under half a minute per page, which he did not regard as unreasonable given the volume of data.

Nothing was allowed for the "Applications Usage" worksheet on the Samsung download, which formed no part of the claim as submitted to the agency and, in any event, had not been shown to be of central importance to the case. The award was likewise confined to the hours originally claimed.