If you go to court and win, the loser will pay your legal costs of going to court, as a general rule. Legal Costs are often in the range of $40,000 to $80,000 for a contested hearing of one or two days in the Supreme Court.
It's no wonder that people avoid going to court if they possibly can - because the legal fees are very high and what they are fighting over is not worth it.
It is for this reason that the Strata Titles Law encourages strata owners and owners corporations / body corporates to take their disputes to the Tribunal, such as NCAT, VCAT or QCAT, which have cheap and informal procedures which keep legal costs to a minimum. They also have a rule that the winner is not entitled to be paid their legal costs by the loser, except in special circumstances.
Tribunals have the disadvantage in that they cannot deal with some disputes and the orders they make are not as enforceable as orders made by the Supreme Court.
It was for this reason that the owner of a valuable car parking space in a strata building at Potts Point (near Kings Cross), went to the NSW Supreme Court to protect access to the car parking space after the owners corporation installed a chain and proposed building and gardening works which restricted access to his car parking space.
The owner won the case and got his orders. But when he applied for an order that the owners corporation pay his legal costs he got a nasty surprise!
The Court ordered him to pay the legal costs of the owners corporation even though he had won, because he had not followed section 253(2) of the Strata Schemes Management Act which requires that he go to the Tribunal first before going to court.
As a result, he ended up paying not only his legal costs but also the owners corporation's legal costs of going to court.
For more information, click on my case note