Covering legal costs before the EFTA Court, Konkurrenten.no v ESA, E-14/10 COSTS

Previously I already wrote about the case Konkurrenten.no. Now the matter of legal costs to be covered by the EFTA Surveillance Authority came back to Luxembourg. The parties finally agreed on hourly rate of € 340 (§ 29) but disagreed on the number of hours. We have the following picture:

Task	Konkurrenten.no appraisal (§§ 5, 10)	EFTA Surveillance Authority appraisal (§ 18)	EFTA Court decision
Drafting the application for annulment	137.50 h	56 h	105 h
Drafting reply to the defense	84.25 h	40 h	55 h
Application for measures of organization leading to the calling of the first witness	29 h	14 h	18 h
Observations on intervention from KTP/Unibuss	4.25 h	4.25 h	4.25 h
Preparation and attendance of oral hearing	31 h	12 h	26 h
Application for the taxation of costs	5 h	0 h	5 h
Total hours:	291 h	126.25 h	189 h
Total lawyers fee:	€ 102 130	€ 42 925	€ 69 360

The EFTA Court explained its deduction with the statement that the case does not raise new points of EEA law (§ 31). Moreover, the Konkurrenten.no lawyer did not represent it in the administrative procedure, and thus needed more time (§ 32).

It is interesting that the EFTA Court decided that the EEA law does not forbid disclosing of a letter headed “without prejudice” in the proceedings for the taxation of recoverable costs (§ 25).