At one level, the ruling of the High Court yesterday on penalty fees is a substantial victory for the plaintiffs, one that will encourage Maurice Blackburn, the law firm that chose to run the case after many years of research on the intricacies and history of the law of penalties.Yesterday's unanimous ruling (by the five High Court judges that heard the appeal) sets out a new doctrine of penalties that applies to all businesses and is not peculiar to banks, or to the wrangle over the merit of $30 fees when someone overdraws his or her account by a few dollars.The ruling may also embolden other plaintiff law firms, which, in conjunction with a widening pool of speculative capital supporting class actions of this type, will target banks more aggressively.An alternative view - one pushed by ANZ - is that the High Court ruling is not that significant to this case.Rather than only some of the controversial fees being ruled as being capable of being viewed as penalties (which is what Justice Michelle Gordon ruled in the Federal Court, in December 2011), the High Court now says that all the fees may be capable as being found to be penalty fees.To highlight this point again: neither the Federal Court not the High Court have yet ruled on whether any of the fees in dispute were penalties.That dispute rests on data not yet presented to the Federal Court and which won't be presented for many months and maybe not until well into 2013. Probably the case will still be going in 2014 and after appeals 2015 or later.Yesterday, ANZ argued that the High Court ruling just winds the case back nine months and has the effect of prolonging the litigation.This may prove to be true. Since more fees need scrutiny, the Federal Court will have to take more time to review what will no doubt be a court book crammed with cost studies and diverse expert opinions on how to allocate costs in a banking business.This may prove a richly ironic exercise, with the substance of ANZ's argument in the next stage of the trial being dependent on evidence that may demonstrate how inefficient the bank actually is.