Cost of instructing non-Jersey based law firms (FOI)

Request

Please advise the expenditure incurred by the Government in the instruction of lawyers and law firms not based in Jersey over the last two years and the percentage of the total external legal spend (ie monies spent which exclude the costs of the Law Officers’ Department) that is paid to non-Jersey based lawyers and law firms.

Response

Information is not held centrally for all the various case costs consolidated for the States of Jersey; the information would have to be extracted by following each cost item under each different cost base for each separate case.

To answer the request, the data would need to be extracted from various sources and manipulated, aside from taking more than the prescribed 12.5 hours to do that work, the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 does not require a Scheduled Public Authority to manipulate data to provide a response. Article 16 has therefore been applied.

Article applied

Article 16 A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.