Strata Management Company entered incorrect Cost Agreement with Law Firm

Long story short-ish…

We have an urgent plumbing fault in our complex that needs to be repaired. We asked our strata manager to get a quote to get the repair made. Our strata manager recommended that he also get estimates from law firms for us to get the builder to come back and fix for us as the complex is still under warranty and also has a host of other minor faults. In the end, the “stage 1” of the law firms’ estimates was similar to the quote for the plumbing repair. Our strata manager said that one of the law firms he got estimates from are very good and would most likely close the deal in “stage 1”, meaning we would pay the same amount as for the repair, but instead get repairs on all of the building problems instead of just the one fault. We agreed to go ahead with his recommendation, but said in no uncertain terms that we were only agreeing to “stage 1” of the law firm’s cost agreement as anything beyond that would be much, much more expensive – so much so that we might as well pay for the repairs ourselves. This was then put in the official meeting minutes accordingly:

“RESOLVED that Owners Corporation review and accept the fee proposals from XXX Lawyers – Stage one (1) initial works estimated amount of $X,XXX.XX” Inc GST to allow further proceeding of possible building defect claim with builder and developer.”

A special levy was struck for this purpose.

The strata manager soon after moved on and was replaced by a new strata manager (same strata management company).

Many months have now gone by (with nothing yet to be repaired), and suddenly we received an email from our strata manager saying that our funds are totally dry and have multiple outstanding bills from the lawyers. We were shocked and baffled. After discussions with the lawyers, they claimed that we were actually currently now in stages 3 & 4 of actions (much of which is “legal advise”). We said that we had only agreed to “stage 1” of their cost agreement, but they said that our strata management company had signed off on the full cost agreement, not an amended agreement only including the “stage 1” works (in fact, the lawyers claim that they were never told by our strata management company at all that we were only happy to proceed with “stage 1”).

Our strata management company are not claiming any responsibility and are saying that because we continued to have email communications with the law firm it was our way of consenting to going beyond “stage 1”.

In our minds, there wasn’t anything beyond “stage 1”. Our whole cost agreement should have been what they are calling “stage 1”.

So now, we have paid well over the estimate we agreed to, plus have even more in outstanding invoices from the law firm. We feel the law firm has some fault in that they never clearly told us that “stage 1” works are complete, but that our strata company is at most fault because they signed off on the full cost agreement with the law firm on our behalf even though we instructed them clearly and in no uncertain terms that we only wished to sign off on the “stage 1” part of the agreement.

So, what to do now? The intuitive thing, I suppose, would be to engage another law firm to force our strata company to pay for any costs above what we agreed to in the minutes. That would yet again be more legal fees though. Fair Trading, perhaps?

Any information/ideas/advice would be much, much appreciated. Thank you in advance.