A High Court judge has ruled Coleen Rooney’s lawyers did not commit misconduct after they were accused of “very substantially” understating some of her costs in the high profile Wagatha Christie libel battle with Rebekah Vardy. Mrs Vardy unsuccessfully sued Mrs Rooney for libel in 2022, and lawyers for the pair returned to court for a further dispute over how much Mrs Vardy should pay in legal costs as a result.
At a hearing in October last year, Mrs Vardy’s barristers told a costs judge that Mrs Rooney and her legal team committed “serious misconduct” by understating some of her costs to “attack the other party’s costs”.
A judge found no misconduct had been committed, and Mrs Vardy decided to appeal against the decision. Mrs Rooney opposed the appeal, with her lawyers describing it as “misconceived”.
In a ruling on Thursday, High Court judge Mr Justice Cavanagh dismissed the appeal. He said: “The appeal must fail on the basis that the judge was entitled to reach the conclusion that he came to.”
In 2019, Mrs Rooney, the wife of former Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney, accused Mrs Vardy of leaking her private information to the press on social media, which Mrs Justice Steyn found in July 2022 was “substantially true”.
The judge later ordered Mrs Vardy, the wife of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, to pay 90% of Mrs Rooney’s costs, including an initial payment of £800,000.
A hearing last October was told that Mrs Rooney’s claimed legal bill – £1,833,906.89 – was more than three times her “agreed costs budget of £540,779.07”.
Jamie Carpenter KC, for Mrs Vardy, said that this was “disproportionate”, and that the earlier “understatement” of some costs was “improper and unreasonable” and used to “attack the other party’s costs”.
Senior Costs Judge Andrew Gordon-Saker said that while there was a “failure to be transparent” by Mrs Rooney’s legal team, he found “on balance and, I have to say, only just” that they had not committed wrongdoing.
In written submissions for the appeal against the decision last month, Mr Carpenter said Mrs Rooney “very substantially understated” her costs by around 40% in her budget, known as a “precedent H”, in 2021, and that the amount Mrs Vardy should pay should therefore be reduced.
Benjamin Williams KC, for Mrs Rooney, said in his written submissions that her budget was “properly and correctly completed” and there was “no tenable case” of misconduct.
In a 38-page ruling, Mr Justice Cavanagh found that Judge Gordon-Saker had “ample material” to reach his decision, adding that there was “no valid basis for challenging on appeal the judge’s conclusion”.
He said: “The court was not persuaded that the claimant had proved that the defendant’s legal advisers had deliberately misled the court, or the claimant, either by things said or things not said.
“There had been a misjudgment in the form of a failure to be more transparent about the basis upon which the defendant’s figures for incurred costs had been prepared, but that was as far as it went.
“The judge was entitled to make the evaluative judgment that this did not amount to unreasonable or improper behaviour, especially as he was so well-placed to form a view about practice in relation to costs.”