Who we are - our Principal

Our principal director is Arthur Steve Kontalis. His legal costing practice was established in 1991 as part of his law practice in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs. After a short period, legal costing became the predominate work and later exclusively so. It then followed on to become a para-legal service and incorporated as the legal costing company it is today.

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Arthur was admitted as a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of New South Wales in 1983 and practised as a litigation Solicitor for over 12 years. Since and during part of that period he has specialised in legal costing for over 30 years. He is on the Roll of Lawyers in NSW, is a former Solicitor of both Supreme Courts of NSW and Queensland, formerly an associate member of the Law Society of NSW.

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Arthur learned his trade in legal costing in the usual way, at the ground level as a litigation Solicitor during the 1980s. As his work was autonomous, he was required to develop his own skills, essentially self-taught in this area, in order to finalise his files and to recover the firm's professional costs.

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In those days Legal Costs Consultants were a handful of individual practitioners and not the big businesses that are more evident today. And so when necessary, Arthur would engage one Mr Bill Easton, a senior and very experienced Legal Costs Consultant, to prepare the Bill of Costs that were required for "taxation" in the Supreme Court. Mr Easton was very generous with his time explaining the more intricacies of those items of work that made up the Bills of Costs. When Arthur sought to move on, he was inspired by this association and indeed was encouraged to himself specialise in legal costing from the early 1990s and thereafter for some 30 years.

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Since that time he has costed in excess of 1000 files.