Cost calculator

What does the evidence cost your team?

Set the hours your counsel, solicitors, experts and project team spend on the evidence in a construction dispute: discussing it, finding earlier replies, reading it, meeting about it and bundling it. The calculator prices that time and shows how much of it a shared, searchable record of the evidence and its discussion might free.

Every rate and reduction is labelled with its basis, so you can see which parts of the result rest on published research and which are assumptions you can change. Nothing you enter leaves your browser.

Published an official, surveyed or court figure, or one derived from published data
Company or vendor reported by a company, or by a study a vendor commissioned
VeriCase assumption an estimate by VeriCase that you can change
Your figure a figure you have entered

Prefer to build the cost up from each item of evidence? Use the discussion cost calculator.

Your matter

Start from the closest kind of matter, then adjust anything. A starting point sets the team, their hours and the meetings; it leaves your rates and reductions as they are.

AdjudicationLarge adjudicationSerial adjudicationsCourt claim

Large adjudication: a team of fourteen, with VeriCase’s estimates of their hours and meetings. Change any figure to match your matter.

Number of matters1

Multiplies one matter. Use 3 or 4 for serial adjudications on one project. No credit is taken for reusing discussion between matters.

Finding earlier replies30% of email time

VeriCase assumption The time spent finding the earlier reply, drawing or attachment before answering. The nearest benchmark is 5.5 hours a week spent looking for project data (PlanGrid with FMI, 2018).

Solicitors’ and paralegals’ rates

Hours in a working day

Guideline rates are the HMCTS solicitors’ guideline hourly rates in effect from 01 January 2026, which the courts use as a starting point for the summary assessment of costs. Rates charged in practice may be higher: choose your own rates to enter them in the team table.

Value only part of the time freed

Hours freed are not always hours billed less. Studies commissioned by software vendors count only part of the time saved as value: Forrester counted 25% in a 2019 study for Microsoft and 80% in a 2024 study for Thomson Reuters. Tick to value only the share you choose; the hours freed are unaffected.

Your team

Tick who is on the matter and set their hours on one matter. Finding earlier replies is worked out from the time on email; meetings are set separately below.

Person and rate basis	Rate, £ an hour	Discussing by email, hours	Reading and review, hours	Bundling, hours
Counsel
Leading counsel (King’s Counsel)Assumption
Junior counselPanel rate
Solicitors
PartnerGuideline rate
Senior associateGuideline rate
AssociateGuideline rate
ParalegalGuideline rate
Experts
Technical expert 1Survey
Technical expert 2Survey
Technical expert 3Survey
Quantum expertSurvey
Delay expertSurvey
Client team
Commercial managerDerived
Project managerAssumption
DirectorAssumption
Team on the matter	14 people	315	565	75

Reductions

The share of each activity’s time that a shared record might free, in per cent. The central case gives the figure that might be freed; the low and high cases set the range in the results. A central figure you change is marked as yours.

Central case: published research only

Leaves out of the central case the reductions that no study measures (reading and bundling) and the company and vendor figures for meetings. Untick it to include them.

Activity	Central, %	Basis of the central case
Discussing the evidence		Published McKinsey Global Institute, July 2012 (25% to 30%)
Finding earlier replies		Published McKinsey Global Institute, July 2012 (30% to 35%)
Meetings	Set for each meeting above	None counted: no independent study measures it
Reading and rereading		None counted in the central case: no study measures this
Bundling		None counted in the central case: no study measures this

Professional time on the evidence, one matter

£364,404

1,338 hours, about 178 working days of 7.5 hours.

Time a shared record might free, central case

£28,290

107 hours, about 14.3 working days (7.8% of the cost above). All of it rests on published research.

An illustration, not a measured result. It applies published research on shared, searchable discussion, made for knowledge workers generally, to the figures above; VeriCase has not measured how much time it saves. Whether time freed becomes a saving depends on how the time is billed and used.

In statutory adjudication each party usually bears its own legal and expert costs, so the cost of this time is not usually recoverable from the other party.

Where the time comes from

Value that might be freed, by activity.

What the result rests on

Value that might be freed, by the evidence behind each reduction used.

Published research100%

The timesheet

One square is one working day of 7.5 hours, five to a row.178 days

By activity

Activity	Hours	Cost	Reduction	Hours freed	Value freed
Discussing the evidence	315	£83,207	25%	78.8	£20,802
Finding earlier replies	94.5	£24,962	30%	28.4	£7,489
Meetings	288	£74,167	0%	0	£0
Reading and rereading	565	£164,070	0%	0	£0
Bundling	75	£17,997	0%	0	£0
Total	1,338	£364,404	7.8%	107	£28,290

By person

Person	Rate	Hours	Hours freed	Value freed
Leading counsel (King’s Counsel)	£600.00	65	3.4	£2,040
Junior counsel	£150.00	118	6.8	£1,020
Partner	£579.00	96	10.2	£5,906
Senior associate	£393.00	148	13.6	£5,345
Associate	£305.00	193	17	£5,185
Paralegal	£210.00	60	0	£0
Technical expert 1	£253.73	71.5	5.1	£1,294
Technical expert 2	£253.73	71.5	5.1	£1,294
Technical expert 3	£253.73	71.5	5.1	£1,294
Quantum expert	£253.73	110	6.8	£1,725
Delay expert	£253.73	110	6.8	£1,725
Commercial manager	£47.50	108	13.6	£646
Project manager	£45.00	66.5	8.5	£383
Director	£85.00	48.5	5.1	£434
Total		1,338	107	£28,290

Range

Case	One matter	Across 1 matters
Low	£17,473	£17,473
Your settings	£28,290	£28,290
High	£67,723	£67,723

The low case uses the bottom of each range, with no reduction in meetings, reading or bundling unless you set one. The high case uses the top of each range, and the higher of your setting and the high figure for every meeting.

How the figures work

The cost of the time is hours multiplied by each person’s rate. Finding earlier replies is a share of each person’s time on email. Meeting time is the number of meetings, multiplied by their length and by each attendee on the team.
Time freed is each activity’s hours multiplied by its reduction. Its value is that time multiplied by the rate, scaled by the share you choose to value if you tick that option.
More than one matter multiplies one matter by the number of matters. No credit is taken for reusing discussion across matters.
The default team, hours and meeting pattern describe a large construction adjudication and are VeriCase estimates.
Leading counsel’s £600 an hour is an assumption: published judgments record counsel’s brief fees rather than hourly rates. Junior counsel’s £150 is the Attorney General’s London A Panel rate, a discounted public-sector rate; rates charged to private clients are typically higher, so enter your own if you know them.
In statutory adjudication each party usually bears its own costs, so the cost of this time is not usually recoverable from the other party. The result is an estimate of time and its cost, not a measured saving.

Notes and sources

Discussing and finding earlier replies: McKinsey Global Institute, The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, July 2012 (Exhibit 20), estimated that social technologies could free 25% to 30% of the time that interaction workers (high-skill knowledge workers) spend reading and answering email, and 30% to 35% of the time they spend searching for and gathering information. The central case uses the lower figures; the low cases (15% and 20%) are VeriCase discounts. These are modelled estimates for knowledge workers generally, drawn from data of 2009, not measured results in construction or law, and they predate VeriCase.
Meetings: no independent study measures how much meeting time a shared record of the discussion removes, so the central case counts none. The optional figures are a 14% fall in the average time each person spent in meetings at Shopify in the first five months of 2023, compared with the same months of 2022, which followed a policy of cancelling recurring meetings rather than a software tool (its chief financial officer, interviewed in Fortune, 14 July 2023); and an 18.9% average fall in the number of meetings in a study commissioned by Microsoft (Forrester Consulting, The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Teams, April 2019).
Reading and bundling: VeriCase assumptions (5% and 10% in the central case when assumptions are included); no study measures them. For context, the review of documents typically accounted for about 73% of the cost of producing electronic disclosure in 57 productions studied by the RAND Institute for Civil Justice (Where the Money Goes, 2012); and in White Winston Select Asset Funds LLC v Mahon [2019] EWHC 1381 (Ch), some 200 to 250 of the more than 8,000 pages in the chronological files were referred to at trial (paragraph 43).
Value placed on time freed: studies of workplace software commonly count only part of the time saved as value. Forrester’s study of Thomson Reuters legal research tools for an in-house legal department (November 2024) counted 80%; its study of Microsoft Teams (April 2019) counted 25%. Both were commissioned by the vendor.
Solicitors’ rates: HMCTS solicitors’ guideline hourly rates in effect from 01 January 2026, by band and grade (A partner, B senior associate, C associate, D trainee or paralegal). The courts use guideline rates as a starting point for the summary assessment of costs; actual charges may be higher. The option of rates claimed in a Technology and Construction Court case uses the hourly rates claimed by the claimant’s solicitors in Lime Technology Ltd v Liverpool City Council [2025] EWHC 2037 (TCC), a procurement claim (partner £1,345.50, senior associate £895.50, associate £463.50), which the judge described as “at the upper range of any possible range” (paragraph 14); no paralegal rate was recorded, so the London 1 Grade D rate is used.
Counsel: there is no official guideline hourly rate for barristers. Junior counsel’s £150 is the Attorney General’s London A Panel rate for government civil work from 01 April 2025, a discounted public-sector rate. £175 and £350 are the lowest and highest of the minimum hourly rates, before value added tax, that Crown Office Chambers publishes for public access work in cases valued under £100,000, depending on the barrister’s seniority (checked 06 October 2026). King’s Counsel at £600 is a VeriCase assumption, with £1,000 as an upper sensitivity; £270 is the Attorney General’s rate from 01 April 2025 for a King’s Counsel of ten years or more whose current rate is £200 to £269, a public-sector floor. Published judgments generally record counsel’s brief fees rather than hourly rates.
Experts: £253.73 is the average hourly rate for report writing reported by expert witnesses working in the civil courts, across all disciplines, in the Bond Solon Expert Witness Survey 2025 (published 07 November 2025; 525 respondents). No current survey reports rates by discipline; replace it with the rates your experts quote.
Client team: the commercial manager’s £47.50 is an estimate of the internal cost to the contractor, derived from a gross salary of £57,000 with employer National Insurance, the statutory minimum employer pension contribution and a 25% overhead, over 1,740 working hours a year. The project manager’s £45 and the director’s £85 are VeriCase assumptions.
Benchmarks for the checks: PlanGrid with FMI, Construction Disconnected, 2018 (599 construction industry leaders; 5.5 hours a week looking for project data and information); McKinsey Global Institute, July 2012 (28% of the working week on email); Rogelberg with Otter.ai, The Cost of Unnecessary Meeting Attendance, 2022 (632 employees; 18 hours a week in meetings); Hon Shu Pang v Justin Zinda [2024] EWHC 176 (KB), paragraphs 17 and 21; Nazzini and Godhe, King’s College London with the Adjudication Society, Construction Adjudication in the United Kingdom, November 2024. Each benchmark covers more than work on the evidence, so the estimates should sit below it.
Starting points: team sizes, minutes, hours and meeting patterns are VeriCase estimates based on practitioner experience, chosen as lower bounds. The same times for each person are used in every starting point of a calculator, so a larger matter costs more only because it has more items, discussions, bundles, meetings or people.
Recovery of costs: in statutory adjudication each party usually bears its own legal and expert costs. In litigation and arbitration some costs may be recoverable from, or payable to, the other party.
The figures show professional time and its cost at the rates shown, and the time that might be freed in each case. They are illustrations: VeriCase has not measured the time it saves, and whether time freed becomes a saving depends on how the time is billed and used.