In Dutch civil litigation the general rule is that the losing party must compensate the litigation costs of the prevailing party. This rule is codified in Articles 237\u2013240 of the Dutch Code of Civil Procedure (DCCP). The system is forfaitary: the court does not award the actual attorney\u2019s fees incurred, but applies the so-called liquidation tariff. This tariff is based on the value of the claim and the number of procedural steps. As a result, the compensation awarded usually covers only a fraction of the real litigation costs.<\/p>\n
Apart from litigation costs, extrajudicial collection costs (buitengerechtelijke kosten<\/em>) play an important role. These are costs made before proceedings are commenced, such as sending reminders, drafting settlement proposals or engaging in negotiations. For consumers, the Dutch legislator has introduced a specific regime in the Act on Standardisation of Extrajudicial Collection Costs (Wet normering buitengerechtelijke incassokosten<\/em>, \u201cWIK\u201d). The Act provides for a statutory scale of percentages depending on the principal amount of the claim. In addition, creditors may only recover such costs if they have first sent the debtor a statutory 14-day notice.<\/p>\n For professional parties (business-to-business relations), the WIK does not apply. The court assesses whether the claimed costs are reasonable and whether they have actually been incurred. In practice, courts often use the WIK-scale as a reference point, but they are free to deviate. Parties may therefore wish to regulate the issue of collection costs explicitly in their contracts.<\/p>\n An important nuance is that extrajudicial costs tend to \u201cchange colour\u201d once proceedings are initiated. Work that could previously be qualified as extrajudicial (for instance, preparing a case, collecting evidence or drafting letters) will once litigation has started be recharacterised as procedural work. In that event, the costs fall under the forfaitary liquidation tariff and are no longer recoverable as a separate item of damages. Only activities that can clearly be distinguished from preparing the litigation file, such as extensive settlement negotiations, may still be compensated as extrajudicial costs.<\/p>\n A notable exception to the forfaitary system exists in cases of abuse of process or wrongful litigation conduct. If a party acts in a manifestly unreasonable manner\u2014for example, by commencing or continuing proceedings while knowing the claim has no reasonable prospect of success, or by conducting the proceedings in a vexatious way\u2014the court may award the prevailing party its actual litigation costs in full. The Dutch Supreme Court (Hoge Raad<\/em>) has confirmed this possibility in several judgments, holding that such conduct can qualify as a tort (Article 6:162 DCC), justifying a departure from the liquidation tariff. However, Dutch courts apply this exception with great restraint.<\/p>\n This framework reflects a deliberate balance: consumer protection on the one hand, limited cost recovery between professional parties on the other, and a safeguard against abusive litigation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Dutch civil litigation the general rule is that the losing party must compensate the litigation costs of the prevailing party. This rule is codified in Articles 237\u2013240 of the Dutch Code of Civil Procedure (DCCP). The system is forfaitary: the court does not award the actual attorney\u2019s fees incurred, but applies the so-called liquidation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":777,"featured_media":32884,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12792],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-netherlands"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ursusnetwork.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ursusnetwork.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ursusnetwork.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ursusnetwork.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/777"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ursusnetwork.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32887"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ursusnetwork.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32889,"href":"https:\/\/ursusnetwork.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32887\/revisions\/32889"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ursusnetwork.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ursusnetwork.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ursusnetwork.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ursusnetwork.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}