Rule 96.30.Court Shall Allow Fees, Costs and Expenses.

Rule 96.30 consolidates the fee and cost allowances that run throughout a partition case into one governing provision. The court must allow a reasonable fee to the attorney who instituted the partition action, recognizing that bringing the suit and shepherding it through the various steps — parties, commissioners, sale, distribution — takes real legal work that benefits everyone with an interest in the property, not just the plaintiff alone.

The rule also lets the court allow a reasonable fee for any guardian ad litem appointed in the case. Given how often partition cases involve parties who are minors, incapacitated, or represented through the appointed-counsel mechanism in Rule 96.04 for unborn or unrepresented future interests, this fee allowance ensures that representation does not go uncompensated.

Beyond attorney and guardian ad litem fees, the court must also allow reasonable costs, expenses, and compensation to the sheriff or commissioner who handled the sale process. All of these amounts — attorney fees, guardian ad litem fees, and sheriff or commissioner costs and expenses — are taxed as costs in the case, folding them into the same cost-allocation framework that covers commissioner and surveyor compensation under Rule 96.13 and recording costs under Rule 96.17.