On the Road to Change? Attorney's Fees Not Recognised by Court Practice: Legal Loophole or Misinterpretation of the Law by the Court?
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Abstract
Nowadays, it is generally accepted that the lawyers are an essential part of the judicial system, despite the absence of any reference to this in the constitution or other normative provisions. In a market economy, there is no question that a lawyer is remunerated for the work he performs, and that the lawyer receives this remuneration in the form of fees or reimbursement of expenses from the client who has concluded a contract of engagement with him. In the case of litigation, however, the costs incurred by the lawyer's client may be passed on to the opposing party, since, as a rule, the costs of the successful party, including the lawyer's fees, are to be paid by the unsuccessful party. This paper examines the basic legal provisions that ensure the enforcement of attorney's fees in civil court proceedings, and then presents a number of striking cases that demonstrate that the attorney's representation of his client in civil proceedings is either not compensated at all or only partially compensated in a manner recognised by the court, in the form of a formal injunction binding the opposing party. In the present paper the adequate issues related to the provision of legal representation in civil litigation are presented, on the one hand, from the procedural law and litigation efficiency aspects, on the other hand, from the contractual freedom and thirdly, from the constitutional law aspects, focusing on the judicial practice. The study describes the change in judicial practice in the spring of 2024. The author seeks an answer to the question whether the principles established by the court practice were due to a legal error, and therefore whether legislative action to eliminate the discrepancies was justified, or whether it was simply a case of an erroneous interpretation of the law by the courts before the spring of 2024, which justified only a change of approach in the court practice within the framework of the existing legal regulation, and therefore no further legislative intervention is necessary.