Third party notices: what costs can be claimed by receiving parties?

Key Points:

The reasonable costs and expenses of producing a document must be borne by the party seeking production, subject to the court's cost assessment.

Even if your organization is not involved in litigation itself as a party, you might still find you are embroiled in someone else's fight if they decide you have documents that are relevant to their court battle.

If you are in that situation, you may incur considerable cost and spend substantial time in locating and producing documents that are only of value to a party to the proceedings. Happily, there is a way to recover those costs.

Although we'll be basing our discussion on the Queensland Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 1999 (Qld) (UCPR), similar rules exist across Australia.