Costs lawyers in law and in Parliament

What the statute book and the parliamentary record say about costs lawyers — searched by 2 phrases, counted, and published with what each phrase catches by mistake.

11documents
3of them Acts
2003 oldest hit — read the caveat
4 contributions in Hansard

Regulator: CLSB
Statutory basis: Legal Services Act 2007 sch.4 (Association of Costs Lawyers as approved regulator)
Register: The profession on this site

The oldest hit is the least trustworthy figure here. Two things make it so, and both are visible in this collection.

The oldest documents are the likeliest to use the word in another sense. The oldest hit for “solicitor” is the Taxation Act 1640, and its only occurrence of the word is “Solicitor Generall to the Kings most excellent Majestie”.

And a hit is not always enacted text. legislation.gov.uk’s revised texts carry its own editorial annotations — notes recording that a provision was amended or applied by something later — and the index reads them. The oldest hit for “notary” is the Ecclesiastical Licences Act 1533, whose only occurrence of the word is the note “S. 11 applied by Public Notaries Act 1843 (c. 90), s. 5”. The 1533 text does not contain it.

When the law mentioned them

2000

2000s 7 in the busiest decade 2020s

Documents per decade, by the year the document itself carries. This is the revised statute book: an Act repealed long ago is generally not on legislation.gov.uk at all, so the early decades are thinner than the history was.

What was searched for, and what it catches

Phrase	What it is	Legislation	Hansard	Debates
“costs lawyer”	The profession	5	0	0
“law costs draftsman”	A historic name	6	4	0

What these phrases catch that is not this profession.

“law costs draftsman” — What the profession was called before the Legal Services Act 2007; the title is unprotected and still in use by people who are not costs lawyers.

Nothing is filtered out on the strength of these. A sweep that dropped what it judged irrelevant could not be checked, and the size of the wrong-sense class is itself worth knowing.

Legislation named after them

1 document whose title contains one of these phrases — the law that is about this profession rather than merely mentioning it.

The Association of Law Costs Draftsmen Order 2006 uksi

The Acts

3 Acts of a Parliament or Assembly mention this profession, against 8 statutory instruments and other secondary material.

Year	Act	Matched
2020	United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020	costs lawyer
2007	Legal Services Act 2007	law costs draftsman
2003	Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003	costs lawyer

The instruments

All 8 statutory instruments and other secondary documents.

Which statute book

Legislature	Documents
United Kingdom	9
Retained EU law	2

These professions are regulated in England and Wales, but the search is not restricted to it: a Scottish instrument mentioning solicitors is about Scottish solicitors, who are a different profession, and dropping it silently would have been a judgement the reader could not check.

In Parliament

4 contributions, 0 debates and 0 written answers mention one of these phrases. Summed across phrases, so a speech naming both the profession and its regulator is counted twice.

What was said, on “law costs draftsman”

All 4 contributions, newest first.

My Lords, I hope not to detain the Committee for very long. I declare my interest as a solicitor of the senior courts of England and Wales—a professional qualification that fills me with considerable pride even now, after many years of practice. In mixed

Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate, Judicial Appointments Commission (Amendment) Regulations 2025 , 8 December 2025 (Lords)

2: Clause 1, page 2, leave out lines 1 to 6 and insert — “PART A2ESTABLISHMENT OF TWO DISTINCT JURISDICTIONSA2 Legal jurisdictions of Wales and of England The legal jurisdiction of England and Wales becomes two legal jurisdictions, that of Wales and that

Wales Bill , 31 October 2016 (Lords)

The policy may have matured, but I assert that this issue needs to be monitored, because it will not go away. That is why the responsibility is not on my Plaid Cymru friends or indeed the official Opposition, but on the Government to acknowledge the impo

Mr Mark Williams, Wales Bill , 12 September 2016 (Commons)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: Government amendments 3 to 7. Amendment 60, in clause 1, page 2, leave out lines 4 to 9 and insert— “Part 2B Establishment of Two Distinct Jurisdictions 92B Legal jurisdictions of W

John Bercow, Wales Bill , 12 September 2016 (Commons)

How this was checked

For each phrase, 3 documents spread across the result set were re-downloaded from legislation.gov.uk and searched for the phrase in their published text.

Not every hit could be confirmed. These documents were returned by the search but the phrase could not be found in any version legislation.gov.uk publishes as text — the revised text, the text as made and the text as enacted were all read. In every case found so far the index holds text the site no longer serves: an EU regulation whose annexes are published as images, or an old Act repealed down to a fragment. They are left in the counts and named here rather than dropped, because a hit that cannot be checked is a different thing from one that has been disproved.

“costs lawyer”: 2 of 3 confirmed. Not found in eur/2017/1259

Legislation from legislation.gov.uk's full-text search; Parliament from the Hansard search API. Both are searched by quoted phrase, and both indexes are stemmed, so one phrase covers its plural. The legislation index is the English-language text: legislation.gov.uk holds Welsh versions of Welsh legislation separately, and a nil return here is a nil return in English. Document counts are a deduplicated union across a profession's phrases. Hansard contribution counts are summed across phrases and are therefore an upper bound, because one speech can match two phrases; the quotations kept are a sample of the total, never the whole of it. Nothing is filtered for relevance -- each phrase carries a caveat naming what it wrongly catches. The oldest hits are the least trustworthy: they are the likeliest to be the word in an older sense, and the legislation index reads legislation.gov.uk's editorial annotations as well as the enacted text, so a document can be returned because a note recording a later amendment mentions the phrase.

Collected 29 September 2026 from legislation.gov.uk and the Hansard search API, both Open Government Licence v3.0.