Background
This costs decision followed substantive reasons delivered in Yan v He [2026] QSC 105, arising from a joint venture to develop land at Sunnybank, Queensland. The plaintiffs — Jikui Yan (“Alex”), construction company Pineland Construction Pty Ltd, and Yanhan Investments Pty Ltd as trustee for the Yanhan Family Trust — brought claims against Jane Jie He (“Jane”), Yi Lu (“Charlie”), Southland Holdings Pty Ltd, and Yi Jie Investments Pty Ltd as trustee for the Yi Jie Family Trust. The claims included equitable estoppel, breach of fiduciary duty, misleading and deceptive conduct under the Australian Consumer Law, and breach of a shareholders agreement.
The outcome on the merits was mixed. Pineland succeeded in obtaining an equitable charge over the property (securing $1,222,099) and damages against Jane for breach of fiduciary duty ($973,080.60), with Southland held to hold a corresponding interest on constructive trust. Yanhan succeeded in its shareholders agreement claim against Yi Jie for $1,222,099. However, Alex failed entirely in all his claims, all three plaintiffs failed in their Australian Consumer Law claims, Pineland failed in its shareholders agreement claim against Yi Jie, and Charlie successfully defended every claim brought against him personally.
Because all plaintiffs were represented by a single firm (MinterEllison) and all defendants by another (HWLE Lawyers), with no evidence distinguishing the work done for individual clients within each group, the parties agreed the appropriate mechanism was a single percentage-based costs order rather than separate issue-by-issue or party-by-party awards.
The Court’s Holding
Hindman J ordered that the first defendant (Jane), third defendant (Southland), and fourth defendant (Yi Jie) pay 75% of the second and third plaintiffs’ (Pineland’s and Yanhan’s) costs of the proceeding, including reserved costs, assessed on the standard basis. No costs order was made in favour of or against the first plaintiff (Alex) or the second defendant (Charlie), reflecting that Alex failed entirely and Charlie succeeded entirely on all claims brought against him.
The court further directed that, in the assessment of those costs, no reduction to Pineland’s and Yanhan’s entitlement should be made merely because work was also performed for the benefit of Alex. This direction was necessary given the single-firm representation: without it, an assessor might otherwise discount the recoverable costs on the basis that some work benefited an unsuccessful party.
The 75% figure, falling between the plaintiffs’ claim of 90% and the defendants’ offer of 65%, reflected the court’s impressionistic assessment of the time consumed by failed claims — particularly the Australian Consumer Law claims on which the plaintiffs were wholly unsuccessful, and the abandoned claims, which together provided a proper basis to reduce recovery from a full costs award. The court also folded in reserved costs from a December 2025 application in which the defendants had successfully sought leave to withdraw deemed admissions, noting that application was partly brought on by the plaintiffs’ own conduct and was closely connected to the ACL claims.
Key Takeaways
- Where multiple plaintiffs and defendants share legal representation with no discernible division of work, courts in Queensland will favour a single percentage-based costs order over attempting multiple separate awards, even at the cost of some imprecision.
- A party who fails entirely — whether plaintiff or defendant — will ordinarily be excluded from any costs order in their favour, and may face an adverse order; here, Alex and Charlie were simply neutralised with no order as to costs in either direction.
- Courts will direct that costs assessors not discount recoverable costs merely because work done for a successful party also incidentally benefited an unsuccessful co-party, provided the two are separately identified in the order.
- Reserved costs from interlocutory applications can be subsumed into the overall percentage-based costs order rather than dealt with separately, where the subject matter of those applications is closely connected to the main proceeding issues.
- Potential “double recovery” arising from overlapping awards (equitable charge and constructive trust over the same property) is best addressed by granting liberty to apply if a concrete dispute arises, rather than by attempting to draft pre-emptive protective orders against hypothetical scenarios.
Why It Matters
This decision offers a practical illustration of how Queensland courts calibrate costs in multi-party commercial litigation where success is genuinely mixed and co-parties share representation. The judgment confirms that the issues-based reduction to costs is conducted by impression and approximation — not mechanical calculation — and that the preference is for a single, clean percentage order that offsets what would otherwise be a tangle of competing costs liabilities across the party groups.
The court’s handling of the double-recovery problem also provides guidance for practitioners structuring final orders after judgments that generate overlapping monetary and proprietary relief: rather than attempting to anticipate every enforcement scenario in the orders themselves, granting liberty to apply keeps the orders workable while preserving the parties’ ability to return to court if a real conflict materialises.