EasyJet founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou has instructed Travers Smith to defend him with regards to a lawsuit brought against him by Bird & Bird for a six-digit sum of unpaid fees.

The dispute between Sir Stelios (pictured) and Bird & Bird arose after the law firm was instructed by easyGroup IP Licensing in 2008 to advise on Sir Stelios's brand dispute with the airline over the use of the easyJet name.

The dispute began in 2008 and reached a conclusion in October last year, with the airline permitted to keep the name.

Bird & Bird filed an unpaid fees claim in November for an amount of around £389,000, and the firm entered default judgment in December after easyGroup attempted to solve the matter out of court rather than directly appointing a solicitor to defend the claim.

However, Sir Stelios has now instructed Travers, led by litigation partner Andrew King, to challenge the claim and is demanding that a process is launched to assess the fees that easyGroup IP was billed by Bird & Bird.

Sir Stelios claims that Bird & Bird's final fees for the work were £2.3m compared to an initial estimate of £1m and that Bird & Bird had failed to inform him in a correct manner of how far above the estimate the fees would end up.

Sir Stelios' witness statement specifically challenges excessive charged by junior fee earners and around £80,000 worth of photocopying costs.

In a letter to the Telegraph published on the easyGroup website, Sir Stelios says: "I have made money by offering low cost services and you can't keep a low cost base in order to offer low prices if you allow suppliers and employees to rip the company off."

"I am planning to make an example of Bird & Bird in order to send a message to all the other law firms that I use throughout the year."

The unpaid fees court claim, dated 4 November 2010, states that Bird & Bird wants to recover around £376,000 of unpaid legal fees plus interest of almost £13,000, in addition to court fees and solicitor costs.

According to his witness statement, when Sir Stelios learned of the Bird & Bird court claim to recover the fees he did not appoint solicitors to defend the claim but instead sent the firm easyJet tickets to meet with him in Monaco to discuss the matter out of court. He says they met on 17 November, failed to reach a solution and that Bird & Bird subsequently asked for the default judgment.

Bird & Bird declined to comment, while Sir Stelios told Legal Week: "Obviously I feel very strongly that I have been ripped off here."