Keywords
Summary

Keywords

Freedom to provide services — Lawyers — Directive 77/249 — Reimbursement of legal costs by the unsuccessful party in a dispute — Judicial rule limiting the reimbursement of fees of lawyers established in other Member States to the scale applicable to national lawyers — Whether permissible — Reimbursement of a local lawyer excluded in the event of his being obliged to work in conjunction with a foreign lawyer — Not permissible — ( Arts 49 EC and 50 EC; Council Directive 77/249, Art. 4)

Summary

Article 49 EC, Article 50 EC and Directive 77/249 to facilitate the effective exercise by lawyers of freedom to provide services must be interpreted as not precluding a judicial rule of a Member State limiting to the level of the fees which would have resulted from representation by a lawyer established in that State the reimbursement, by an unsuccessful party in a dispute to the successful party, of costs in respect of the services provided by a lawyer established in another Member State.

With the exception of the conditions requiring residence or registration with a professional organisation, mentioned in Article 4 of Directive 77/249, all other conditions and rules in force in the host country may apply to the transfrontier provision of services by a lawyer. The reimbursement of the fees of a lawyer established in a Member State may therefore also be made subject to the rules applicable to lawyers established in another Member State.

Article 49 EC and Directive 77/249 must, however, be construed as precluding a judicial rule of a Member State which provides that the successful party to a dispute, in which that party has been represented by a lawyer established in another Member State, cannot recover from the unsuccessful party, in addition to the fees of that lawyer, the fees of a lawyer practising before the court seised of the dispute who, under the national legislation in question, was required to work in conjunction with the first lawyer.

The obligation to have recourse to the services of a lawyer practising before the court seised means that the resulting costs will be necessary for the purposes of appropriate legal representation. The general exclusion of such costs from the amount to be reimbursed by the unsuccessful party would penalise the successful party, with the effect that parties to legal proceedings would be strongly discouraged from having recourse to lawyers established in other Member States. The freedom of such lawyers to provide their services would thereby be obstructed and harmonisation of the sector, as initiated by Directive 77/249, would be adversely affected.

see paras 29-31, 39, 41, operative part 1-2