A lawyer who had expected payment in excess of €100,000 for services he gave a client has instead been ordered to reimburse some €60,000 to the client’s heir, with an appeals court even ordering him to pay an additional €1,000 for having filed a vexatious and baseless appeal.

The case involved lawyer Johann Debono and Eugenio Bartolo, the heir of Emanuel Grech.

Debono had been Grech’s lawyer for three years and was listed as executor of his will in 2010, but not in 2011 when the will was changed, shortly before Grech died.

The lawyer claimed he had many long meetings with Grech over the three years and carried out extensive research and studies while giving Grech legal advice He calculated that he was due €100,000 for that work.

He also claimed that he had agreed with Grech that he would not be paid immediately but he would be nominated executor of Grech’s will at 6% of the value of the assets.

Subsequently, he however asked Grech for lump sum payments for services. No invoices were issued, but he issued non-fiscal receipts. Between 2009 and 011 Grech paid the lawyer €62,000.

Grech died in 2011 and Bartolo, his heir, asked the lawyer for an account of his services and also asked him to reimburse funds which were, he insisted, had not been due. Once he did not receive an account, he instituted a court case, demanding an account of the lawyer’s services and reimbursement of funds not indicated in the statement of fees issued by the court registrar.

In 2008, seven years after Grech’s death, the lawyer asked the court registrar to issue the statement of fees due, which he calculated at €107,382 in terms of established tariffs.

The lawyer lost the court case instituted by Bartolo and was ordered to pay him €62,000. The court found that the lawyer had failed to present the slightest evidence of the services he claimed to have carried out for Grech. He had not issued invoices and waited until late in the case to present the statement of fees from the registry.

The court wondered what the €62,000 paid while Grech was still alive were for, once the lawyer had expected to be paid from Grech’s estate.

The court also argued that the fact that the lawyer had spent hours speaking with Grech in his bar was not enough to convince it that he was providing professional services or that he had a verbal agreement to justify what he was paid and what he said was still due.

The lawyer subsequently appealed.

The appeals court upheld the findings of the first court, observing that when a lawyer expected payment for his services, he had a duty to prove he had provided those services and what they consisted of.

Although the court registry had issued a statement of fees, that was not a court document, but a document by the registrar based on what he was told by the lawyer.

It dismissed the version of events given by the lawyer and said it bordered on the incredible. The lawyer had admitted that he never billed Emanuel Grech over two-and-a-half years. Then, suddenly, three years into Bartolo's case against him he managed to prepare an account, not to present as evidence or to send to the heir, but to file at the civil court for the issue of the statement of fees by the registrar. The registrar’s statement was based solely on what the lawyer had declared.

The appeals court said it could not but consider this behaviour as unacceptable and contemptuous, more so as when he presented his account to the registrar, he failed to declare that the pretensions were the subject of a court case instituted three years previously.

The court said that even at first glance, the statement covering January 2008-September 2010 and drawn up seven years after Grech’s death appeared to be fabricated.

The court noted various parts of the statement, such as how for February 2008 the lawyer claimed he had dedicated 61 hours of work for Grech, an average of two hours per day including weekends. And as if this was not enough, it resulted that most of these hours were spent at Grech’s bar. Hardly anything was said as to what justified so many intensive, constant and continuous hours of legal work other than the repeated claim that the lawyer used to tell Grech what his assets were and how he could protect them.

Everything was verbal and there was nothing in writing. The research that was supposedly done by the lawyer was not exhibited, even though that was the least that one expected from someone who claimed he was entitled to payment of over €100,000 for professional services.

The appeals court therefore agreed with the first court that the lawyer had no right to receive over €60,000 for ‘phantom professional services”. The lawyer’s appeal was therefore dismissed.

The appeals court was presided by Mr Justice Robert Mangion with judges Grazio Mercieca and Josette Demicoli.