Mrs Vardy unsuccessfully sued Coleen Rooney in 2022
A court has ruled in favour of Coleen Rooney after Rebekah Vardy’s lawyers claimed the formers legal team had committed ‘very substantial’ misconduct during the Wagatha Christie trial.
Rooney’s team were accused of “deliberately” understating some of their costs during the high-profile libel battle.
Mrs Vardy – the wife of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy – unsuccessfully sued Mrs Rooney – the wife of ex-England and Manchester United star Wayne Rooney – in 2022, with the pair now in further dispute over legal fees.
In October last year, a hearing was told that Mrs Rooney’s claimed legal bill – £1,833,906.89 – was more than three times her “agreed costs budget of £540,779.07”.
Jamie Carpenter KC, for Mrs Vardy, said that this was “disproportionate”, and that the earlier “understatement” of some costs was “improper and unreasonable” and used to “attack the other party’s costs”.
Senior Costs Judge Andrew Gordon-Saker said at the time that while there was a “failure to be transparent” by Mrs Rooney’s legal team, he found “on balance and, I have to say, only just” that they had not committed wrongdoing.
Mrs Vardy appealed the decision last month, claiming it constituted “serious misconduct”, while Mrs Rooney’s lawyers claimed the challenge was “misconceived”.
In a 38-page ruling on Thursday, High Court judge Mr Justice Cavanagh dismissed the appeal.
He said: “The appeal must fail on the basis that the judge was entitled to reach the conclusion that he came to.”
In 2019, Mrs Rooney accused Mrs Vardy of leaking her private information to the press on social media, which Mrs Justice Steyn found in July 2022 was “substantially true”.
The judge later ordered Mrs Vardy to pay 90% of Mrs Rooney’s costs, including an initial payment of £800,000.
Mr Justice Cavanagh found that Judge Gordon-Saker had “ample material” to reach his decision, adding that there was “no valid basis for challenging on appeal the judge’s conclusion”.
He said: “The court was not persuaded that the claimant had proved that the defendant’s legal advisers had deliberately misled the court, or the claimant, either by things said or things not said.
“There had been a misjudgment in the form of a failure to be more transparent about the basis upon which the defendant’s figures for incurred costs had been prepared, but that was as far as it went.
“The judge was entitled to make the evaluative judgment that this did not amount to unreasonable or improper behaviour, especially as he was so well-placed to form a view about practice in relation to costs.”
