Putting Lancashire First
It was interesting to see the breakdown of costs provided by Cuadrilla in their claim against Tina Rothery, and how they tried their hardest to limit the amounts spent and used the opportunity to support business in Lancashire.
Along with the other costs making up the amazing £62,871 they tried to claim was a time cost from Eversheds’ office in Leeds (That’s in Yorkshire isn’t it? Don’t we have lawyers in Lancashire then?) for
So a trainee spent 2 hours and 12 minutes on drafting a legal notice to be inserted into newspapers.
Presumably (let us know if we are wrong Cuadrilla please and we’ll correct this ) this the same legal notice for which they then also engaged not one but two PR companies to deal with. Both of these are of course are based in Lancashire. Oh no! Hang on – sorry, the invoices were sent from their London offices.
We were gobsmacked! Does it really cost nearly £7,000 to insert a legal notice in each of 2 local newspapers and the on-line version of one of them? In fact the Lancashire Evening Post and the Blackpool Gazette are both Johnston Press publications and Blackpooltoday.co.uk is just the Blackpool Gazette online). This does sound an awful lot doesn’t it? We made a brief enquiry with Johnstone Press as to how much a half page print advert in their regional titles might be and were given a ball-park figure of £700 – £1200 per title to play with. We didn’t see it but we doubt this notice needed to be bigger than a half page. We can’t imagine that the on-line version would cost more, but if anyone knows differently please let us know. On that basis a figure of £3,000 would seem more reasonable. After all the work in preparing the notices for print had apparently been done by an Eversheds trainee.
And does it really cost nearly £7,000 to insert a legal notice in the Times? Goodness!
It does beg the question as to why a major legal firm couldn’t arrange for a legal notice to be inserted into a couple of newspapers and why two London based PR companies had to be involved doesn’t it? We are sure that they must have made every effort to ensure that only reasonable costs were presented as incurred. If Cuadrilla would like to shed any light on this we’ll gladly publish their response here.
And we wouldn’t want anyone to think that Cuadrilla’s commitment to “Putting Lancashire first” was just a slogan, whilst they actually support businesses just about everywhere else would we?
