“Precedent”? Please can you elaborate on what you mean by precedent here. If you mean that the general rules of court are that the legal fees follow the decision then, well, yes that’s just “normal” (not precedent). If you mean that you say something about this interlocutors injunctive relief dictates, by way of ‘precedent’, what will be determined in terms of legal costs in the substantive matter hearing, I’d like to understand the basis of that thought.
The tricky part about litigation costs (and please I’m not saying here that AVZ have an issue in this regard - just talking generally about such costs) is even if a party does get the costs awarded AFTER a successful litigation outcome, it doesn’t mean:
they get paid back all of their actual fees (there are schedules as to what can be claimed and how much they are paid for that which very often is less than the fees actually paid),
the payment doesn’t happen until after judgement (which can be a long time after a hearing and certainly not during the trial),
the party still has to fund the costs to their legal team/experts etc (those lawyers don’t work for free in these types of disputes and won’t be happy to “wait for a costs order”.
What they may have at the moment is an order which ensures that the “costs” of this interlocutors injunction action are reserved to be able to be added onto any eventual costs order made in the substantive case.
Of course if some arbitration or other settlement happens before a court hearing, very often part of such resolution includes a “parties pay their own costs” clause - so no costs are then “recovered”.
Just trying to point out that litigation is not cheap or free but if that’s the only way to have successful outcome to a dispute then the “cost” usually is outweighed by the overall outcome … certainly that would be expected to be the case with a successful outcome here.
Hope that helps as I was very curious about you statements of “precedent” and “costs” being cashflow increases.
I’m not sure though re the “penalty” part here how that can be claimed by AVZ and how it is enforced. Probably by further legal action by AVZ showing, evidencing and proving how a breach of the injunction has occurred and then reliant on enforcement being able to be made, including funds being available to pay the penalty. If it came to that I’d suggest that there would be many red flags of deeper concerns raised than recovery of a mere $50k fine per day of default.
