Court proceedings are definitely not free. With fine-tuning your arguments, a lawyer will often assist you, and the lawyer is entitled to compensation for their work. The litigation will also cost you, for example, court fees, travel expenses, as well as the time spent attending the court hearing or gathering evidence. Will you recover your expenses if you win the case? And how much will you have to pay if you lose? This article will briefly address these questions.
Costs of Court Proceedings
The court's judgment includes a ruling on the costs of the proceedings. The court will decide whether one of the parties to the dispute is entitled, at least partially, to recover the costs of the court proceedings. The costs of the proceedings consist of the legal representation fees (which you are entitled to only if you are represented by a lawyer), out-of-pocket expenses (travel expenses to the court hearing and lost income for the time spent attending the hearing), and other costs incurred during the proceedings. This may include the court fee for filing the lawsuit (which is usually 4% or 5% of the dispute value), costs for certain types of evidence, such as expert opinions suggested by one party to support its claims.
The amount awarded by the court to the successful party for legal representation fees is usually lower than the fee you paid to the lawyer for their services. Lawyers are generally paid based on an hourly rate (though you can agree otherwise), but the court calculates these costs based on the so-called "advocacy tariff,"[1] which is a regulation specifying the calculation of lawyer's fees for legal services. The calculation of the fee for individual legal services is usually based on the value of the dispute, and the amount calculated by the court may not cover the actual fees you paid to the lawyer.
Let us explain the calculation of legal representation costs with a simple example. For a court case involving a claim for the payment of 100,000 CZK, in case of success, the court would award the plaintiff the following costs:
The court also awards a so-called "overhead fee," which is a flat rate compensation for domestic postage, local phone calls, and transportation expenses, amounting to 300 CZK per action, or 1,500 CZK total.
If the lawyer is also a VAT payer, they are entitled to VAT on the calculated lawyer's fees and overhead expenses. In the case of full success, the court would award the successful party 29,585 CZK for legal representation costs, including VAT. Adding the court fee, the total award for the winning party would be 34,585 CZK.
If you or your lawyer need to travel to the court hearing, the court will also award travel expenses (fuel costs for traveling by car or the price of a train ticket, for example). The lawyer is also entitled to compensation for lost time at a rate of 100 CZK for every half-hour spent traveling to and from the hearing. From 2025, due to an amendment to the advocacy tariff, the overhead fee will increase from 300 CZK to 450 CZK per task, and compensation for lost time will rise from 100 CZK to 150 CZK per started half-hour. However, the calculation of the tariff value will remain the same.
Partial Success
In the case of only partial success, the costs of the proceedings are calculated differently. For example, if the court awards you only 80,000 CZK out of the 100,000 CZK you requested, the litigation costs will not amount to 80% of the calculated amount. A 20% unsuccessful portion is deducted from the 80% success, and the winning party is entitled to only 60% of the litigation costs. The court may also decide that no party is entitled to reimbursement of litigation costs.
[1] Decree No. 177/1996 Coll., Decree of the Ministry of Justice on the Fees and Reimbursements for Lawyers for Providing Legal Services (Advocacy Tariff)
We used a publicly available AI translation tool to translate this article from Czech to English. Please contact us if any of the above information is unclear to you.
