R v Ozemelam

Neutral Citation No. [2026] EWHC 1155 (SCCO) Case No: 07WZ0567224 SCCO Reference: SC-2025-CRI-000157 IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE SENIOR COURTS COSTS OFFICE Thomas More Building Royal Courts of Justice London, WC2A 2LL Date:14 May 2026 Before: SENIOR COSTS JUDGE ROWLEY R v OZEMELAM Judgment on Appeal under Regulation 29 of the Criminal Legal Aid (Remuneration) Regulations 2013 Appellant: A2 Solicitors The appeal has been successful for the reasons set out below. The appropriate additional payment, to which should be added the sum of £700 (exclusive of VAT) for costs and the £100 paid on appeal, should accordingly be made to the Applicant. SENIOR COSTS JUDGE ROWLEY Senior Costs Judge Rowley:

1. This is the appeal of A2 solicitors against the decision of the determining officer regarding the fee allowed for special preparation under the Litigators Graduated Fee Scheme as set out in the Criminal Legal Aid (Remuneration) Regulations 2013, as amended.

2. The solicitors were instructed on behalf of Kevin Ozemelam, who faced a six count indictment regarding the supply of Class A and B drugs together with charges of “requiring [a] person to perform forced or compulsory labour” and “assault by beating.”

3. The defendant denied the charges concerning the forced labour and assault and said that he and the person alleged by the Crown to be vulnerable were in fact involved in the enterprise together. The Crown rejected that case and called the alleged victim as a witness.

4. Accordingly, the solicitors say, that it was essential to trawl through the raw phone data to unearth evidence to support the defendant’s account and which then led to the performing of forced or compulsory labour charge being dropped. Had this not occurred, the solicitors say that Mr Ozemelam was looking at a custodial sentence in double figures.

5. The Crown provided by way of unused disclosure an exhibit numbered PB/2/100724, which contained the raw call data. The description on the multimedia evidence form was that it was in the medium of an Excel spreadsheet which could be accessed using the links set out on the form to obtain two separate documents described as “pre-data” and “first data”.

6. Mr Joshua, who appeared on behalf of his firm on the hearing of this appeal, informed me that when the links were used, what was produced were in fact two PDF documents. As part of the appeal hearing, he produced them for me to consider. During the redetermination and written reasons procedure, he also enabled the determining officer to have access to the DCS in order to see the same document and, as I understand it, be able to use the links in the document on the DCS.

7. It is not apparent from the determining officer’s written reasons, whether he availed himself of this opportunity, but in any event, he concluded in his original determination that; “The form and nature of the data indicates that they were disclosed in Excel format transposed into PDF format. The transposed data has distorted the actual page [count]. If the original Excel document would have been used, the time for consideration would be greatly reduced.”

8. In his redetermination letter, the determining officer, said: “The nature of the data is such that they were disclosed in Excel format which is transposed into PDF format. This has increased the page count of the data.”

9. In his written reasons, the determining officer reiterated that the data had been disclosed in Excel format transposed into PDF, “which distorted the layout and significantly increased the page count.”

10. Throughout this process, the determining officer’s original determination of 40 hours at Grade B was undisturbed. The solicitors claim 101.33 hours at Grade A.

11. In the written reasons, the determining officer produced some screenshots of elements of the download which he considered reinforced his view that the data had originally been provided in Excel format and then transposed into a PDF. Mr Joshua’s argument was simply that this had never been done by his firm and that he had been provided with two PDF documents which ran to 6,200 pages and two members of his firm had gone through those pages in just over 100 hours looking for the evidence referred to above.

12. Having looked at the PDFs, it is plain that the data was originally included in an Excel spreadsheet. There are, for example, “######” entries which are regularly seen where the data within a particular cell is too wide to be displayed in the width of the column. Therefore, at least to this extent, in my view, the determining officer was correct to consider that the information was originally produced as an Excel spreadsheet and the notice regarding the unused evidence is correct to refer to an Excel spreadsheet on its face.

13. However, I have some difficulty in then following the determining officer’s conclusion that the evidence has been distorted and the page count increased as a result. In his determination, the determining officer referred to the ability to manipulate a spreadsheet being faster than a PDF. Given the nature of the information sought from the data, I accept Mr Joshua’s comment that in fact it would not be any faster because it was not a matter of searching for a particular telephone number or similar which could be filtered much more quickly. The evidence sought related to the relationship between the defendant and the alleged victim.

14. More fundamentally, in the redetermination and in the written reasons, the determining officer has asserted that the page count has been significantly increased. I can accept that this is regularly the case where a PDF is produced by converting an Excel spreadsheet using standard Microsoft tools. But it seems to me that this increase in the page count is not borne out by a perusal of the two PDF documents.

15. As I described to Mr Joshua at the appeal hearing, the PDF has the appearance of someone highlighting a number of columns on an Excel spreadsheet; copying them onto a word document; and then repeating this task of the spreadsheet being copied onto subsequent pages of the word document. That word document has then been converted into a PDF. The effect of this process is that all of the pages of the PDF are replete with information. There is none of the usual blank or almost blank pages which regularly appear where an Excel spreadsheet has been converted into a PDF document. It is only the very last two pages of the 4,863 page PDF where such blank or almost blank pages can be seen.

16. In my view therefore, the general assertion that an Excel spreadsheet converted into a PDF increases the page count is not made out here. All of the pages of the PDF are full of rows and columns of data. As such, in this case at least, it seems to me that there is no difference between the information having been produced on an Excel spreadsheet or a PDF document by someone in the prosecution or possibly the telephone provider.

17. The second difficulty found by the determining officer with the claim produced by the solicitors, concerns the number of pages claimed. The claim was for 6,200 pages. The determining officer then refers to “both first and second downloads sums [sic] up to 6,178 pages” and then says that the work logs indicate that both fee earners reviewed 3,985 pages of data.

18. The determining officer, with some understatement, described this as a little bit confusing. By the time of the written reasons, he had clarified that there were 6,178 pages of telephone data and 22 pages of unused schedules represented the 6,200 pages claimed. It is not clear to me as to whether or not the 3,985 page figure was still considered at that point. It is not clear to me in any event as to how that figure was produced.

19. The two spreadsheets amount to 4,863 pages and 1,315 pages which make the 6,178 page figure to be added to the 22 pages of unused schedules. The work logs show that all of the pages were considered.

20. The determining officer maintained his view about the transposition of the information from an Excel spreadsheet to a PDF in his written reasons. He does not deal with the question of the number of pages viewed, but concludes in both the redetermination and the written reasons that, since no additional materials were provided, he maintained the original 40 hours allowed at Grade B was a reasonable timeframe in which to review the disclosed data “using appropriate search techniques.”

21. For the reasons I have already set out, I do not accept that the search techniques – essentially utilising Ctrl+F – referred to in some other cases would be applicable here, even if the solicitors had been provided with the Excel version. Moreover, I do not accept that that version was ever available to the solicitors and therefore the question of alternative searching techniques does not arise.

22. On the basis that the determining officer’s allowance is founded on the number of pages being less than 4,000, and that other search techniques may have been applied, it does not seem to me that the 40 hours can stand given that I have not accepted either of those conclusions. The number of pages actually present here would take the hundred hours or so claimed at a rough rate of one page per minute. There are some authorities which deprecate a mechanistic calculation of that nature, but it provides a cross check to suggest that the time claimed by the solicitors is in itself a reasonable one. It was plainly an important task in the context of the charges with which the defendant was faced and I take the view that it is a reasonable period of time in which to carry out this task.

23. I therefore direct the determining officer to recalculate the special preparation claim based upon the (net) 101.33 hours claimed. Since the solicitors have been successful in their appeal, they are entitled to a contribution to their fees and the court fee in addition.