Sister awarded costs for win over father’s will

A lawyer who lost a case over the will of his late father, Wellington businessman Lofty Surridge, should pay his sister nearly $100,000 costs, a judge has decided.

The case over the will, and a related deed, had been ‘‘the definition of adversarial litigation’’, Justice Karen Clark said recently in a decision from the High Court in Wellington.

‘‘The parties levelled countless accusations at one another and produced copious amounts of evidence in attempts to malign the character of the other.’’

‘‘The palpable acrimony undeniably and disproportionately escalated costs,’’ the judge said of lawyer Paul Surridge and his businesswoman sister Anne Surridge.

In some cases legal costs are paid out of the estate, which in the case of Lofty Surridge was estimated to be worth $8.6 million by the time the affairs of the ‘‘idiosyncratic and curmudgeonly’’ Surridge were aired in court in late 2018.

But the judge said to award costs to Anne Surridge, who succeeded in having a 2014 will overturned in favour of an earlier will, from the estate would negatively impact on Lofty Surridge’s three other children who took neutral, or less adversarial stances.

It would be unjust for them to bear the cost of the hostility between Paul and Anne Surridge, so the judge ordered Paul to pay Anne $96,386.09 towards her legal costs.

The entire proceeding was mired with acrimony and much of the evidence and submissions from both sides amounted to irrelevant and unhelpful attempts at personal attacks, the judge said.

Anne had made two offers to settle the case before it went to a full hearing, one of them on terms slightly more favourable to Paul than the judge ultimately decided. However Paul Surridge did not refuse to settle without reasonable justification before all the evidence was tested in court, the judge said.

Paul Surridge’s wife, Marion Pearson, was ordered to pay Anne Surridge $11,076.53, for attempting to undo an earlier settlement to which she had agreed, related to securing an option to buy Surridge assets at a discounted price.

The judge found the attempt was an abuse of process, and that should have been obvious to Pearson all along, the judge said.