Greenwich Citizens Advice Go's Live

Instant Law & LawWorks Partner to increase access

Instant Law UK & Law Works the legal Pro-Bono Charity have partnered to increase access to clients who fall outside the Legal Aid Eligibility rules or who are not in a position to access or funds representation.

LawWorks is a national charity which aims to provide free legal help through pro bono assistance to individuals and community groups who cannot afford to pay for it and who are unable to access legal aid.

In the last year LawWorks helped provide free legal advice to over 45,000 people and around 350 voluntary sector organisations. We work with just over 100 member law firms and teams of in-house counsel, as well as mediators, law students and solicitors who have been made redundant.

Instant Law UK have added the Law Works service and link to its Library on-line service. The Instant Law UK solicitors will also now be in a position to advise clients and were appropriate refer them onto LawWorks.

Direct Public Access- Can Lawyers deliver?

Direct Public Access – Can lawyers deliver?

 Ian Dodd: Business development Director:

The legal regulatory bodies have made it easier for both solicitors and barristers to engage directly with members of the public to provide open and transparent services. Can, though, the establishment make things even easier and overcome the inhibitions and suspicions some of their prospective clients have about the legal profession?

Despite trying and, in some cases, succeeding, to make it easier for lawyers to talk to ordinary folk there does seem to remain a reluctance from Mr and Mrs Public to take their legal problems to those best equipped to solve them.

For many, lawyers seem distant, unapproachable, stuffy, judgemental, intimidating   and, above all, expensive. Some lawyers, though, have gone a long way to ensure that their websites are easily accessible, their high street offices welcoming, their staff down-to-earth and their prices reasonable; though these are in the minority, it seems. There are also some lawyers who don’t want to have ordinary folk as their clients and deliberately discriminate against them and market to the monied middle classes.

Solicitors can find it easier to appeal to and accommodate direct public access clients. Their locations, business plans, experience and general ease-of-use work in their favour. The Bar, however, have a bigger problem. Their offices (or chambers as they will continue to call them) are not, normally, found in that part of town members of the general public frequent. Their tradition and experience is dealing with professional clients. Many don’t have manned reception areas, have inadequate waiting areas and insufficient conference rooms where private discussions can take place. The Bar is also having problems coming to terms with the necessity and mechanism of the ‘up-front’ payment direct public access necessarily demands.

Naturally, the market responds to these opportunities and challenges and there are a growing number of entrepreneurial businesses trying to ensure that it’s as easy as possible for members of the public to make contact with lawyers. These are, mainly, web-based and offer on-line or telephone access to solicitors or barristers with user-friendly and transparent pricing.

All of the above suffer from the same inherent problem; it’s hard for members of the public to find them.

Solicitors’ offices and barristers’ chambers can be hard to find and opening hours and appointment-making might be inconvenient, especially during the working day when it could be hard for a potential direct public access client to get out of work. Some legal businesses are open on Saturday mornings though their, normally, city centre locations can be equally inconvenient for a suburban or country dweller.

Web sites make the search easier, of course, though some degree of knowledge about what to enter into the search engine is needed and, unless the site owner has worked on web site-optimisation, it could be a long and fruitless search.

The easiest way to encourage and allow members of the public to access and use legal services must, surely, be to take those services to them in places they visit regularly or can get to with.

Indeed, there are some solicitors’ businesses who have a presence in public places such as shopping centres and there are others who have dedicated, high street shop-fronts looking more like a shop than a solicitors.

Taking this a logical step further Instant Law are installing private, secure booths or working areas in public libraries up and down the country so that members of the public can, at their convenience and without an appointment, talk to a lawyer and get advice.

Using unique, state-of-the-art video conferencing software and an easy to use, on-screen start page a member of the public can see and speak to a lawyer and, at the end of a 20 or 30 minute, free, initial consultation, will know if they have a case which can be progressed, what the next moves might be and, more importantly, how much it is all liable to cost.

This service is becoming increasingly popular with libraries and a growing number are incorporating it in the wide range of public services they offer to their users.

This democratisation of direct public access is, through public libraries, reaching a wide audience. Birmingham Central Library, for example, has a foot-fall of about 4 million/year and the Paradise Shopping Centre, to which it is attached has a foot-fall of 3 million/week.

Large conurbations, such as Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle, have about a million people a year using them. There are about 3500 public libraries in the country and they, like every other business, are looking for innovative ways to encourage people to use them and their growing list of services.

Maybe initiatives like Instant Law teaming up with public libraries is one way that the legal profession can widen their appeal and offer members of the public services at their convenience and on their terms?

Ian Dodd:

idodd@ian-network.co.uk     (07766365412)

Before joining Instant Law UK Ian spent six years running a major Chartered Surveying business, which was an introduction to professional services and the last ten years being a CEO in barristers' chambers and forming a start-up Alternative Business Structure. Ian’s experience has given him a thorough understanding of the legal profession

Instant Law UK Launches In Islington

PRESS RELEASE

INSTANT LAW LAUNCHES IN ISLINGTON CENTRAL LIBRARY

Instant Law UK is teaming up with Islington Library and Heritage Services to launch Instant Law, the interactive, online legal advice service which is being rolled out in an increasing number of libraries throughout the country.

Library users will be able to get free legal advice directly from specialist lawyers via secure video-conferencing software. The dedicated computer screen will display an easy to use menu to help customers  select the area of advice they need which will offer a range of subjects including Immigration, Employment, Landlord & Tenant and Family as well as wide range of other legal, consumer and related matters . This initial consultation of up to 30 minutes is free to visitors to the library, who will be using unique, easy-to-use software and video conference call facilities developed by Instant Law UK.

Ian Dodd, Business Development Director at Instant Law UK said, “People can often find it difficult to fix a convenient appointment time to discuss their problems and some find solicitors’ premises rather intimidating. Providing this service through the library network overcomes these problems and provides a professional advice service. We’re delighted to be launching our first library terminal here in Islington in the heart of London. Islington Library and Heritage Services has shown its commitment to innovation with this move, and they join the initial six locations we have using the system.”

Cllr Janet Burgess said: “We have nearly 1.5 million visits a year to Islington’s libraries and we are committed to keeping our libraries open and developing the range of services we offer to the public. We’re excited to play host to the country’s first online legal service, which will give the public a new alternative access to legal information and advice.”

Instant Law’s free service is supported by people who go on to get paid for legal advice. This is delivered by local lawyers so that if face-to-face meetings are required library customers won’t have to travel far.

……………ends…………………

For further information contact John Smith on 020 7527 6922 or atjohn.smith@islington.gov.uk

Or  Ian Dodd on 07766 365412 or at idodd@ian-network.co.uk

“This service is invaluable".

Greenwich Citizens Advice Bureau

PRESS RELEASE

INSTANT LAW UK partners with GREENWICH  CITIZENS ADVICE BUREAU to Launch a FREE video conferencing legal advice service from 13^th August 2012.

Instant Law UK is teaming up with (Greenwich Citizens Advice Bureaux Ltd) to launch Instant Law, the  interactive, online legal advice service which is being rolled out in an increasing number of libraries throughout the country.

Citizen Advice Bureau users and staff will be able to get free legal advice directly from specialist lawyers via secure video-conferencing software. The dedicated computer screen will display an easy to use menu to help customers  select the area of advice they need which will offer a range of subjects including Immigration, Employment, Landlord & Tenant and Family as well as wide range of other legal, consumer and related matters . This initial consultation is free to visitors to the library, who will be using unique, easy-to-use software and video conference call facilities developed by Instant Law UK.

Ian Dodd, Business Development Director at Instant Law UK said, “People can often find it difficult to fix a convenient appointment time to discuss their problems and some find solicitors’ premises rather intimidating. Providing this service in partnership with Greenwich Citizens Advice Bureau overcomes these problems and provides a professional advice service. We’re delighted to be partnering with Greenwich Citizens Advice has shown itself to be ground-breakingly innovative with this move and they join the other six locations we have using the system.”

(A quote From Traci Jenkins) – “This service is invaluable. These are challenging times where our local communities are facing ever increasing difficulties accessing free, quality legal advice. I am confident that this service will not only be an asset to the Greenwich Citizens Advice Bureaux, but will provide an alternative route for those in need of specialist legal advice”

Instant Law’s UK free service will be supported by on-going legal advice delivered by local lawyers so that if face-to-face meetings are required users won’t have to travel far.

……………ends…………………

For further information contact Ian Dodd on 07766 365412 or at idodd@ian-network.co.uk

Traci Jenkins Greenwich Citizens Advice Bureaux Ltd : 0208 855 7472

Free Video Conf Legal Advice for Home Users

 Home Users & Business:

FREE video conferencing LEGAL ADVICE TRIAL


Following the Instant Law UK launch of its free video conferencing service in partnership with library services, we are now seeking to run a 2 months trial with Home users and SME.


The service will allow the service to be accessed from the users home or office. The users will access free face to face legal advice from solicitors, covering a range of legal subjects, including family, landlord & Tenant, Immigration, Employment, Business advice.


The service will start from 10.00am Monday 23rd^th July 2012.

To access the service simply visit www.instant-law.co.uk and register.

On registration the user will be able to access the service immediately.



The aim of the trial is to test the use of technology and how we can use it to open up access.


We only ask that user of the system provide us with feedback, allowing us to improve the service.



For further information contact: info@ian-network.co.uk

Brent Library Services extends solicitor led free legal advice service

Free interactive online legal service now available for Brent’s library users

Interactive online legal advice is now available at the Town Hall Library after Brent Council teamed up with Instant Law UK to launch the free service to library users.

Instant Law, which started on Friday (15 June), offers library users free legal advice directly from specialist lawyers via secure video-conferencing software. The dedicated computer screen will display an easy-to-use menu to help customers  select the area of advice they need including advice around immigration, employment, landlord and tenant, family, and consumer law and related matters . The initial consultation is free to visitors to the library, who will be using unique, easy-to-use software and video conference call facilities developed by Instant Law UK.

Instant Law will be available at the Town Hall Library from 10am to 5.30pm Monday to Friday. The Town Hall Library is based in Brent Town Hall, Forty Lane, Wembley.

Ian Dodd, Business Development Director at Instant Law UK, said: “People can often find it difficult to fix a convenient appointment time to discuss their problems and some find solicitors’ premises rather intimidating. Providing this service through the library network overcomes these problems and provides a professional advice service. We’re delighted to be launching our first library terminal here in the heart of London. Brent Council’s library service has shown itself to be innovative with this move and they join the other six locations we have using the system.”

Councillor James Powney, Brent Council’s Lead Member for Environment and Neighbourhood Services, said: “Instant Law is an innovative addition to the range of services which Brent’s libraries offer the borough’s library users and residents and we’re excited to play host to this online legal service, which will help to improve residents’ access to legal information and advice. Not only are Brent’s libraries are now open seven days a week, but they’re continually improving their offer to users.”

Instant Law’s free service will be supported by ongoing legal advice delivered by local lawyers so that if face-to-face meetings are required library customers won’t have to travel far.

ENDS

Notes to Editors:

1.      For further information contact Ian Dodd on 07766 365 412 or at idodd@ian-network.co.uk

Tower Hamlets partners with Instant Law UK

INSTANT LAW LAUNCHES IN TOWER HAMLETS

Instant Law UK is teaming up with Tower Hamlets Council’s Idea Store to launch Instant Law, the interactive, online legal advice service which is being rolled out in an increasing number of libraries throughout the country. The 1^st kiosk at the Idea Stores will be trailed at its flagship store, Idea Store Whitechapel, 321 Whitechapel Road, LondonE1 1BU.

Idea Store users will be able to get free legal advice directly from specialist lawyers via secure video-conferencing software. The dedicated computer screen will display an easy to use menu to help customers  select the area of advice they need which will offer a range of subjects including Immigration, Employment, Landlord & Tenant and Family as well as wide range of other legal, consumer and related matters . This initial consultation is free to visitors to the library, who will be using unique, easy-to-use software and video conference call facilities developed by Instant Law UK.

Ian Dodd, Business Development Director at Instant Law UK said, “People can often find it difficult to fix a convenient appointment time to discuss their problems and some find solicitors’ premises rather intimidating. Providing this service through the library network overcomes these problems and provides a professional advice service. We’re delighted to be launching our first library terminal here in the heart of London. Tower Hamlets Council’s Idea Store servicehas shown itself to be ground-breakingly innovative with this move and they join the other six locations we have using the system.”

Asab Ali, Idea Store Manager said “Being able to obtain free and accurate legal information is vital for our residents. Idea Store users have access to extensive legal databases through our website and now, thanks to Instant Law, we can provide free face to face contact with specialist lawyers in Idea Store Whitechapel.”

Instant Law’s free service will be supported by on-going legal advice delivered by local lawyers so that if face-to-face meetings are required library customers won’t have to travel far.

……………ends…………………

For further information contact Ian Dodd on 07766 365412 or at idodd@ian-network.co.uk

Didn't see that one coming

Of all those big names brands claimed to have an interest in legal services identified in the run up to the so-called ‘Big Bang’ introduction of alternative business structures, no one spotted the legendary lorry magnate Eddie Stobart (with its distinctive green and yellow livery) creeping up in the fast lane.

The logistics business the Stobart Group last week launched a new service to ‘link members of the public and businesses direct to a barrister without needing to employ a solicitor’. ‘It is by some distance the most unexpected development so far in the post-Legal Services Act world,’ noted Legal Futures.

Quite; but it also makes wonderful sense.

Could there be a better way of assisting the Bar with its unfortunate image problem? Nothing cuts through all those old, tried and not entirely unfair clichés – you know, unapproachable, elitist, pompous etc - than the words ‘Eddie Stobart’.

In the context of the Legal Services Act 2007, ‘direct access’ to the Bar is a small but significant step in the direction of liberalization. It is only eight years since the Bar Council scrapped the centuries-old rule that litigants who wanted to instruct a barrister had to do so through a solicitor following pressure from the Office for Fair Trading. A year after Sir David Clementi began his review of regulation into legal services. 

By the way, Stobart Barristers (as they are known) have no ambitions to become an ABS. Instead, they will run under the 2004 public access regime. ‘We’ll give it to you straight,’ they promise. They are offering fixed-fees and a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model for litigation.

It is unsurprising - and welcome news for consumers - that new market entrants are ditching the hourly rate so beloved of lawyers, and so hated by clients. In a 2010 study (Shopping around: what consumers want from legal services, Jures) 2,000-plus consumers were asked for their preferred way to pay for legal services: fixed fee was the most popular option (48%), followed by no win no fee (where the lawyer takes the risk of losing the case) (38%). No surprises that only the tiniest minority (2%) wanted hourly rates.

The launch of Riverview Law earlier this year was called ‘the boldest-ever post-Legal Services Act move involving the Bar’. The idea behind Riverview is annual contracts for unlimited legal advice for every type of corporate client from SMEs to FTSE 100 companies (starting at just £200). At the forefront of the Riverview proposition is the Bar. Out of a team of some 75 lawyers, there are 43 barristers including 12 QCs. That heavy weight offering includes Richard Lissack QC, Riverview’s head of the business and international teams, and Jonathan Caplan QC.

Impressive but - for my money - the nation's favourite hauliers have pipped Riverview (backed by global law firm DLA Piper through the holding company LawVest). 
Trevor Howarth, legal director at Stobart Barristers, has said that because of the problems in legal aid and solicitors increasingly doing advocacy in-house, more barristers are ‘readily available’. ‘Consumers don’t know where to look or which barrister to pick, leaving many to still having to rely on the advice of their solicitor,’ he said. ‘But in doing so they are forced to pay significant fees. Our model cuts out waste and opens up access to a national panel of barristers that are selected for their ability to meet our clients’ needs.’

I wrote recently in this blog about the Co-op promising to bring affordable, fixed fees to divorcing couples. ‘Legal aid has provided a really important safety net for people over the last 50 years and that safety net is being pulled away,’ Christina Blacklaws, who joined the retailer from legal aid firm TV Edwards told me. As of April 2013 when the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act comes into force, people will only be eligible for legal aid if there is evidence of domestic violence. ‘What does that say about our legal aid scheme?’ said Blacklaws. ‘Hopefully we will help to bridge the gap.’

We launched www.thejusticegap.com, an online magazine aimed at the public about the law and justice on October 6th – the day ABSs came into force. As Michael Mansfield QC puts it on our site, the ‘justice gap’ refers to the increasing section of the public too poor to afford a lawyer and not poor enough to qualify for legal aid.

One of the first articles we ran on its launch date was by David Edmonds, chair of the Legal Services Board. Edmonds gently reminded lawyers that ‘for all the legions of column inches’ devoted to the liberalisation in the legal press these reforms were ‘less about lawyers and more about consumers’.

‘We expect ABS to widen access to justice,’ he says. ‘The new competitive pressures and impetus towards innovation should increase the availability and reach of legal services.’ 
The realities of LASPO restrict access to the justice in fairly brutal ways; but it remains to be seen whether newly competitive pressures will meaningfully close that gap and whether private practice lawyers - as well as the new market entrants - rise to the challenge.

Are legal aid clients really second class citizens?

‘It’s a myth that clients get the same level of service on legal aid rates as when they pay privately - that disappeared about 10 years ago.’ So said Ian Kelcey, a leading defence lawyer and a senior partner at Bristol firm Kelcey & Hall here.

If that was the case, then it was news for many defence lawyers living under the illusion that they owed an equality of service to both those rich enough to pay and those who depend on the state. ‘There is no excuse for not doing your very best for each and every client (which I am sure Ian’s firm does), or for reducing the levels of service you offer if you intend to carry on with criminal defence work that is state-funded,’ wrote defence lawyer John Storer yesterday on www.thejusticegap.com here. ‘No one is forced to take on a legal aid contract; it is a matter of choice for each firm.’

Quite. By the way, Kelcey was calling for criminal firms (in the words of the The Law Society Gazette) to ‘make it clear’ to legal aid clients how ‘their publicly funded status affects the service they get’. ‘We can’t supply a platinum level of service with base metal rates of pay,’ he warned.

Kelcey, a Law Society council member, argued that firms needed to take a look at the ability of the advocates. ‘It’s hard for young advocates to resist the senior partner who says they should go and be the junior on a murder,’ he said.

If lawyers start giving their legal aid clients a second-rate service, then maybe they stop doing publicly funded work. That’s not to diminish the pressures on defence firms. Professor Richard Moorhead has just been appointed the first chair in law and professional ethics at University College London. Unsurprisingly then, the academic has a more nuanced view.

‘Lawyers have to provide a competent service, whatever they are paid or they have to decline the work,’ Prof Moorhead says; adding that he has ‘great sympathy’ with Kelcey’s concerns about ‘economic pressure on quality’. ‘But telling clients to expect poorer quality service smacks of an attempt to shift practitioner anger at legal aid cuts to clients. It's a plan that will only backfire: more complaints, less business, weaker practices and an erosion of the belief in equal justice for all.’

Equally, Prof Moorhead argues that it ‘must be the case that legal aid clients get lower levels of service. Otherwise, why charge private clients more?’ Continuing that line of thinking, Prof Moorhead asks: ‘Do firms have to advise those clients there should be a more cut price option which they can better afford? Isn't that the logic of Mr Kelcey's position?’ he asks.

Kelcey’s case was hardly bolstered by seemingly supportive comments – anonymous obviously. ‘I am delighted our firm lost its legal aid contract for family matters,’ wrote ‘Richard’. ‘Our firm has now started to resemble normality and the waiting room no resembles the green room for the Jeremy Kyle show. They would phone up, making demands, and often eat the time of senior management who ended up being roped in because they got irate and complained. Often private clients would suffer as far too much energy was being expanded on these clients. Now we can focus on private clients, have some tranquility, and begin to make money.’

The charming ‘Richard’ later returned to clarify a few things (‘No, I am not ashamed of myself...’). The family legal aid contract ‘nearly brought our firm to its knees’, he said. Plus he had another anecdote to relate. ‘I will never forget the expression of discomfort on the face of a private client who was paying over £1000 for his will and IHT advice, when he had to sit in our waiting room next to a woman who had brought in her own supply of special brew and her brood of children.’

There should be a collective sigh of relief on the part of legal aid clients everywhere that Richard’s firm has abandoned publicly-funded law. It is shocking that someone with such an absence of empathy should have been let loose on vulnerable clients. Good riddance, I say.

Ian Kelcey rightly raises a critical issue: how the structural pressures on the criminal defence professional negatively impact upon the quality of defence. It was a theme of Wrongly Accused: Who is responsible for investigating Miscarriages ofJustice, part of the JusticeGap series which came out last month. ‘The financial pressures on solicitors’ practices nowadays are so great that turnover and profit rank far higher than actually doing a good job for the client and ethics come nowhere,’ wrote Maslen Merchant, a legal executive who specializes in miscarriages. It was a provocative article - not everyone agreed with Merchant (as you can see from the comments).

At the launch of Wrongly Accused, Gareth Peirce put her concerns in a characteristically strident fashion. She pointed out ‘an ever present danger’ in every case for a miscarriage. ‘Lawyers are at the heart of many cases of the wrongly accused and wrongly convicted: wrong, shoddy, lazy representation. It is a recurrent theme. It should haunt us.’ She pointed out that the Birmingham 6’s original lawyers who saw them first ‘when they were beaten up, got their legal aid forms signed but failed to note their injuries’.

Instant Law UK

Instant Law UK turns to experienced CABx and Law Centre Debt advisors to launch its free Debt and Money Advice Service, with the recruitment of the first of its home based experienced debt advisor Rebecca Lawrence.

Rebecca is an experienced LSC DEBT/HOUSING SUPERVISOR/WELFARE BENEFITS ADVISER, with experience of working both in a CABx setting as a supervisor but also with private practice as a specialist family lawyer.

Working in partnership with local authority service the service will go live Monday 14th May 2012 allowing library users to access the service both within a library setting and from home.

The Library users will be able to get free legal advice directly from specialist lawyers via secure video-conferencing software. The dedicated computer screen will display an easy to use menu to help customers select the area of advice they need which will offer a range of subjects including Immigration, Employment, Landlord & Tenant and Family matters. This initial consultation is free to visitors to the library, who will be using unique, easy-to-use software and video conference call facilities developed by Instant Law UK.

A bad day for justice

So that’s that then.  The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill has completed its way through parliament and about an hour ago received Royal Assent after months of fierce debate and a savaging by the peers.

I was in the House of Lords as it completed its passage last week. The Bill received a deserved kicking in the Lords; but, frankly, the legislation remains substantively as it was when the green paper was published in autumn 2010.

‘I genuinely believe access to justice is the hallmark of a civilised society,’ said Ken Clarke back then. The justice secretary was introducing the most radical reforms to the legal aid scheme since it was introduced as a building block in the architecture of the postwar welfare state.

‘So large a volume of defeats occurred because the Government adopted inflexible attitudes and lost the arguments on their merits,’ Lord David Pannick argued on LASPO’s last day in the Lords. The Bill had been made ‘marginally better’ by the forced changes, reflected the barrister fairly; adding that it would have been ‘marginally better’ still had his own amendment been accepted. Pannick sought to remedy the perceived ‘defect’ in Clause 1 of the Bill, which omitted to reflect that the objective of the justice secretary and his legislation was to secure ‘access to justice’.

Pannick argued that the ‘unsatisfactory manner’ in which the Government treated that amendment was ‘typical of the unsatisfactory manner in which the Government have proceeded on this Bill generally’. ‘The Government were defeated on this Bill on 11 occasions on report and three times again last Monday,’ he added.  

According to the silk, the Government's ‘general inflexibility’ involved ‘a failure adequately to assess the impact of the provisions’; ‘a refusal to take on board the fact that many of the financial savings are illusory’; as well as ‘a refusal to recognise that the limits on the scope of legal aid imposed by Part 1 will hit hardest the weakest and most impoverished sections of our society.’ It remained ‘a bad Bill’, he said.

So what has been achieved by access to justice lobby? Quite a lot. As the campaigning group Justice For All point out, in the wake of the green paper, legal aid was saved for special educational needs and international child abduction cases; the hugely controversial mandatory telephone gateway was limited to a pilot involving four, and later restricted to three, areas of law; and the plan to force those with more than £1,000 of disposable capital to make a £100 contribution to their legal costs was dropped.

Thanks to the Lords there were three major concessions (reported in this blog last week), ministers gave significant ground in a number of areas of their plans relating to domestic violence; public funding will now remain for welfare benefit appeals to the second tier tribunal and higher courts and for the first tier tribunal on 'points of law'; and the Director of Legal Aid Casework will be independent from Government. Plus, ministers will be able to add, as well as remove areas of law, from the scope of legal aid without primary legislation. Victims of trafficking will still be entitled to legal aid, and funds will remain for clinical negligence cases where the negligence occurred during the first eight weeks of life. Legal aid will still be available in police stations.

All important changes. Nonetheless the Act represents a filleting of our legal aid system - removing £350m from the £2.2bn scheme by cutting entire areas of law from scope. It is the end for funding for much of what is known as 'social welfare law' - that’s advice on debt, benefits, employment, family (unless it involves domestic violence) and housing advice (unless someone is left homeless). 

Talking to Lord Bach after last week’s debate, the peer repeated his damning assessment of the Bill as ‘wicked’. ‘It is an attack on poor people, the vulnerable and disabled: the people who cannot answer back,’ Bach, who led the opposition attack on LASPO in the House of Lords, said.

Lord Pannick, a member of the House of Lords' constitutional committee, identified a vacuum at the heart of LASPO: its failure to recognise ‘access to justice as a vital constitutional principle’. The QC’s amendment to clause 1 stated that the Lord Chancellor ‘must secure, within the resources made available, that individuals have access to legal services that effectively meet the needs’. Some 18 months down the line, Ken Clarke’s stated belief in ‘access to justice’ being the ‘hallmark of a civilised society’ rings particularly hollow.

No laughing matter

Perhaps one shouldn’t be too surprised at a certain lack of empathy for the lot of the working man from legal aid minister and heir to a £300m family business Jonathan Djanogly (see here and also here). Even so he displayed a shocking lack of sensitivity during last week’s debate on the legal aid Bill. Ministers rejected all but three of the 11 of the amendments made by peers to their controversial Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill.

The incident arose during an angry debate about the government plans not to protect mesothelioma victims from the ‘no win, no fee’ reforms which would mean that lawyers’ fees coming out of any compensation aid out for the invariably fatal disease. Every year about 2,000 people die of mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lung that arises from exposure to asbestos.

To set the scene, Djanogly, seemingly unembarrassed by his own ambulance-chasing connections, explained how his government’s reforms were all about fighting the ‘compensation culture’. He argued that the opposition’s amendments ‘rate one sort of claim above another’. ‘Somehow, a mesothelioma claim is automatically more worthy than a personal injury claim. The Government simply do not accept that,’ he argued.

It was a crass dismissal of a condition which leaves sufferers dead within on average 12 to 18 months of diagnosis. Anyhow, Blaydon Labour MP and former UNISON union president Dave Anderson, argued that it was very easy to stop our so called ‘compo culture’. ‘Tell employers to stop killing people at work and to stop poisoning people at work. Then people would not be able to claim compensation,’ he said.

Anderson spoke of employers who had contempt for workers. ‘They let workmen go home in dirty work clothes that their wives then washed, and became infected with mesothelioma through doing so. What happened was known by employers. We are talking about employers who were using young kids in Namibia to fill plastic sacks with raw asbestos. They put young kids of seven, eight or nine in the sacks to tamp the asbestos down. That is the type of people we are dealing with—people with no regard for human life.’

The MP reckoned that 42,000 people die in the past 40 years in this country and 60,000 more will die in the next 50. ‘That is more than 1,000 people a year and more than were being killed in the coal mines in this country in the disastrous years of the 1930s,’ said the former miner. ‘That is why this is a special issue.’

Was Djanogoly moved by such arguments? Apparently not. You can view it here (handily signposted at 21.59.45). It’s not an edifying sight. Labour MPs berate the minister for ‘smirking’ and inappropriate ‘body language’ and having ‘giggled and grinned through descriptions of people dying of mesothelioma’. ‘In almost 15 years in this house, I have never seen conduct which so demeans a minister of the crown and which is so damaging to the reputation of this house,’ said Labour MP Helen Jones.

Important concessions were made last week. Namely, ministers appeared to accept that there was a risk of political interference in the role of the director of legal aid casework work when determining exceptional funding provision. They also conceded that legal aid was necessary for welfare benefits appeals to the upper tribunal and senior courts although the justice secretary Ken Clarke rejected amendments to provide legal aid for reviews and appeals to the lower tribunal. However he did suggest that he was investigating with the DWP a system of providing legal aid in the lower tribunal where a point of law was at stake.

The government also backed down on another critical aspect of the LASPO debate. For many commentators the government’s overly prescriptive and baffling take on domestic violence has been indicative of its approach to the legal aid cuts. The Legal aid bill makes domestic violence a precondition for legal aid to access any private family law advice. It’s a massive cut to the scheme: there were 211,000 family cases last year where people received initial advice and assistance under the family ‘legal help’ scheme alone.

Most fair-minded people – and that includes the courts and the police - understand ‘domestic violence’ to encompass ‘emotional’ as well as ‘physical’ violence. Not so the coalition, who proposed that legal aid be restricted to physical violence and, then, only where there was ‘clear objective evidence’ of domestic violence. The good news is that the definition of ‘domestic violence’ has now been amended to reflect the ACPO one. Clarke has indicated that a broader range of evidence would be accepted (notes from a GP or social worker and entrance to a refuge). It’s a welcome change.

A new public service

‘Nothing less than the introduction of a new public service,’ wrote Michael Zander QC, emeritus professor of law at the LSE, of the nascent law centre movement in 1978. I wrote last year in my Guardian blog that the legal not-for-profit sector would bear the brunt of the legal aid cuts that threaten to slash £350 million from the £2.2 billion total budget. I also reflected last week in the same blog, that it was time for the law centres movement to adapt or die as a result of the Legal Aid, Punishment and Sentencing of Offenders Bill.

The Legal Action Group, in its London Advice Watch report, recently predicted that some 80 legal NfP agencies could lose £9.3 million as a result of the legal aid Bill and that would force many agencies to ‘close their doors for good or to cut back drastically’.

The Law Centres Federation last year revealed that that 18 of the 56 law centres were under threat of closure. ‘Already law centres have lost or about to lose in this financial year 53% of their local authority funding,’ LCF director Julie Bishop told me. It was a mixed picture: one centre received a 12% increase and others, such as Hammersmith and Fulham, faced 100% cuts.

According to the LCF, about 46% of its members’ funding came from legal aid and roughly 40% from local authorities with the remainder comes from a variety of sources such as charitable trusts. That funding pattern varies dramatically from centre to centre and so, for example, Islington Law Centre has 16 separate streams of funding whereas other law centres only have one or two. The 18 centres that the LCF identified for possible closure are those most heavily dependent on public funding– in other words, where 60% plus of funding was from legal aid.

The vision of the law centre movement was set out in 1968 pamphlet called Justice for all by the Society of Labour Lawyers which reflected ‘widespread concern’ about ‘serious defects in the provision of legal services to the community’. It made the case for a ‘new institution’ in the law which would ‘function as a public service, staffed by salaried lawyers’ and which would ‘coexist with and be supplemental to private practice’. Michael Zander was on its committee. 
Interestingly, the Conservative party at around the same time argued (in a paper called Rough Justice) that the legal system had to reach out to the poor in order to remedy ‘the failure of many people who need legal advice to ever get to a solicitor's office’. However the mainstream profession fiercely resisted such ideas. ‘They contemplate a radical departure from the concept of legal aid as so far developed… and by introducing a separate and distinct legal service, it would exercise a divisive social influence,’ noted the Law Society in its objections to the Justice for all proposals.

The LASPO Bill will ‘decimate income’ for law centres, comments David Gilmore, a consultant who specialises in advises legal aid firms and the NfP sector. ‘Law centres don't want to charge clients but for some, it could be a matter of survival.’

So both Rochdale and Islington law centres are moving into private fee-paying work. But these new arrangements aren’t simply about financially propping up what remains of the legal aid scheme. As David Gilmore puts it: ‘I don't think it's about competing with solicitors or making money. A key objective of introduce charging services where categories go out of the scope of legal aid – for example, employment and immigration - is to retain the skills of specialised lawyers working within the NfP sector. Once those skills have gone, it would be difficult to get them back.’

As he explains, those agencies that do, reluctantly, decide to introduce charging services ‘will ensure that any surpluses are either re-invested in the service or given to the law centre’. The idea at Rochdale and Islington is to separate the fee-paying business into a standalone community interest company (or CIC), a relatively new corporate structure designed for social enterprises that want to use profits for the public good.

While a law centre, as an entity, is not allowed to charge for services, a linked organisation may, Gilmore explains. ‘For example, a law centre may, through an ABS application own a separate charging company. Alternatively, key personnel from the law centre could establish a community interest company or a co-operative through which to charge for services.’ A CIC is new corporate structure introduced by New Labour and designed for social enterprises that want to use profits for the public good

‘We have spent a lot of time looking at whether the primary aim should be to support the law centre financially or whether it should be to meet the needs of clients who would otherwise go without access to justice,’ Ruth Hayes, manager of Islington law centre told me. ‘Our primary purpose is to meet a social need,’ said Hayes. ‘We know that there will be people with no access to any funds and those who will go without services next year.’

Their solution is to means test clients and offer cheaper rates accordingly - cheapest rates for those on very low incomes (‘i.e. those who would be eligible for help under legal aid at the moment’) and a premium or supporters’ rate for, as Hayes puts it: ‘the kind of people who would buy fair trade coffee or their Christmas cards from Oxfam – i.e., who were going to do this anyway but who would like to know that the profit element will support our work for people who would otherwise not be able to afford help’.

A few miles to the East, Hackney Community Law Centre has also decided to ‘fight back’ but in a different way and by going back to the movement’s roots. The law centre is launching a major profile-raising initiative to, in the words of manager Sean Canning ‘popularise the concept of the law centre’. True to the law centre ethos, it will be rolling out its ‘Community Law Shops’ initiative taking its services directly to the community through a presence in local libraries and FE colleges.

Serving a deprived but vibrant community in East London for almost 40 years, the law centre is (in its own words) ‘part of Hackney’s furniture’. The centre reports that it has taken on 52% more cases this year in housing, welfare benefits and debt compared to the previous 12 months. Its ways of working may have to change but – Hackney insists - its raison d’etre remains the same. Just as the first law centres created waves in the legal establishment when they first opened, so Hackney Law Centre now hopes to do the same all over again.

Forget Tesco Law...

If ever a movement was wrongly named then frankly it’s ‘Tesco Law’, the shorthand for the ongoing deregulation of legal services. Tesco has famously shown zero interest in the law, whereas their high street rivals the Co-Op have built a legal division from scratch to almost 450 employees in six years.

Last week Co-operative Legal Services became the first consumer brand officially to be licensed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. The retailer, together with two high street firms (John Welch and Stammers and Lawbridge Solicitors Ltd), became the first SRA-licensed alternative business structures (ABSs) under the Legal Services Act 2007.

I spoke to Eddie Ryan, managing director of the Co-Operative Legal Services, last week and asked if he expected commentators to adopt a name change. ‘If they continue to call it “Tesco Law”, I’ll be bemused,’ said Ryan. ‘“Co-Op law” should have been adopted some six years ago as soon as we established Co-Operative legal services.’

This is the third in a series of blogs to explore ‘access to justice’ in the context of ABSs and the savage cuts of the Legal Aid, Punishment and Sentencing of Offenders Bill. The Co-op sits at that intersection where liberalization of the legal services market meets the massive retrenchment of the legal aid scheme.

In my first blog, I reported that at the end of last year the Co-Op launched a family law service spearheaded by lawyers from leading London legal aid firm TV Edwards. Jenny Beck, co-chair of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group and former managing partner of TV Edwards, denied her decision was motivated by money. ‘If you were a legal aid lawyer 10 years ago you would have been helping infinitely more people than now,’ she said.

Quite. In fact, the Co-op has long noted the cultural fit between its co-operative values and that of publicly funded law. Four years ago I interviewed Eddie Ryan for the Legal Action Group’s Legal Action journal in an article looking at whether new market entrants under the ABS regime would have any interest in legal aid work. It has to be said that the weren’t prospective ABSs queuing up to discuss their plans to promote access to justice to those people who are traditionally excluded from legal services. But Ryan spoke then about the Co-op ‘wrapping our arms about people who need our help’. ‘Legal services are a distress purchase or a purchase of necessity,’ he said. ‘We are there when people need us or in times of distress.’

The rhetoric sounds great; but what – if anything – can the Co-op offer to clients that is not being offered already? Hopefully, we shall soon see. A key part of the Co-op’s move into legal services will be a low-price, fixed fee tariff for family work. The Legal aid Bill will scrap legal aid for nearly all family cases. That leaves an enormous justice gap.

Earlier this month Sir Nicholas Wall, president of the family division, predicted ‘a substantial increase’ in the numbers of litigants-in-person ending up in the family courts as a result of the government’s proposals. Sir Nicholas drew a distinction between ‘big money’ cases and routine cases. ‘What worries me are the smaller cases where there is no representation, where, for example.... there is a serious imbalance between an impoverished wife and a better off husband,’ he told the family lawyers’ group Resolution annual conference. ‘The difficulty is compounded if neither side receives sensible advice.’

On the government’s own figures there were 53,800 cases last year where people received representation before the courts under the legal aid scheme – plus a further 211,000 family cases where people received initial advice and assistance.

‘Legal aid has provided a really important safety net for people over the last 50 years and that safety net is being pulled away,’ Christina Blacklaws, who chairs the Law Society’s legal affairs and policy board, told me. Parties will only be eligible for legal aid if there is evidence of domestic violence. ‘What does that say about our legal aid scheme?’ said Blacklaws. ‘Hopefully we will help to bridge the gap.’

We can expect the Co-operative Legal Services to be heavily promoting low-price, fixed fee tariff for divorce work. For all the hype about the marketing clout of solicitor networks such as QualitySolicitors.com, it shouldn’t be overlooked that every week 15 million shoppers walk down the aisles of some 3,000 stores.

Fixed fees in divorce work is a genuinely compelling offer and gives vulnerable clients price certainty at a time of their lives when they need it most. As Blacklaws told me she couldn’t actually afford her own services as a lawyer. ‘No one likes hourly rates,’ she said. ‘We are going to be doing away with that so we can have good value, quality, fixed-price services and people know exactly what they are going to get.’

Dial '1' for Justice

One of the most controversial ideas at the heart of the proposed legal aid reforms is a helpline whereby people who qualify for publicly funded advice can actually talk to a lawyer on the telephone as opposed to having to go through all the hassle of seeing them face-to-face. So far, so uncontroversial, it might seem – unless that is you have been following the Legal Aid, Punishment and Sentencing of Offenders Bill (LASPO).

What ministers are actually proposing is a helpline that acts as a ‘single gateway’ to what survives of an emaciated, post-cuts legal aid scheme. By ‘gateway’, they mean a ‘mandatory’ single point of entry into the publicly funded legal advice scheme. The idea is less about enabling people to secure access to justice and more about restricting the ways in which they can get their hands on public funds.

The proposals will build on the Community Legal Advice helpline set up by the Legal Services Commission in 2004. Legal aid lawyers have long been suspicious of the motives for extending telephone advice at the expense of face-to-face advice. The government spent £20 million on the advice line last year and some 397,191 callers were helped last year - of that number 272,372 enquiries were closed ‘at the triage stage’. A 2011 customer satisfaction survey found 95% of the callers were ‘satisfied’.

The fact that the humble telephone is greeted in legal aid circles as either ‘a great new technology or the harbinger of the apocalypse’ (to quote Crispin Passmore, strategy director at the Legal Services Board and formerly of the LSC) tells its own story.

No doubt many lawyers will feel their suspicions have been confirmed by the legal aid Bill. The fear that the LASPO ‘gateway’ proposal becomes another hurdle excluding even more people from a diminished scheme is well placed. Earlier this month peers backed an amendment to the Bill to remove the provisions for both ‘a mandatory telephone gateway and the delivery of legally aided services exclusively by telephone’. Paralympic gold medallist Baroness Grey-Thompson, and independent crossbench peer, tabled the amendment. She sought a duty to promote ‘the plurality of provision’. ‘A telephone-only service may work for a large number of people,’ she said. ‘However, it may adversely impact the most vulnerable clients, who may struggle to explain complex problems over the phone.’

A ‘plurality of provision’ is what all clients of legal services want and need (even publicly-funded ones). One of the promises of this brave new world of deregulated legal services is greater accessibility for clients and, in particular, the ability to communicate with your lawyer in the way that suits you best.

For new market entrants coming into the legal services market under the Legal Services Act 2007’s alternative business structure regime (i.e., retailers, banks, insurers etc) telephone help-lines and online advice aren’t innovations, they are just the basics.

Roger Smith, director of JUSTICE, wrote an interesting paper last week to ‘kick off a project looking at whether, and to what extent, the internet and telephone ‘hotlines’ might replace face to face legal services’. ‘The instinct of most practitioners is to say “never”: that of ministers and civil servants anxious to save money “not soon enough”,’ he wrote. The title of the paper (Internet legal advice: interesting but dull?) offered an insight into his own experience trawling the Internet.

I feel for him. I have written elsewhere about the shocking dearth of decent online information. Of course, there are exceptions (Citizens Advice's Advice Guide and Advice Now's Living Together) but – generally speaking – it is an information desert out there. But it’s worse than that. The internet, rather then being a useful resource for those in need of legal help, has become overcrowded, difficult for consumers to navigate and unreliable. I wrote in my Guardian blog that the Internet ‘can be a treacherous place for those seeking legal help when law firms and claims companies regard it as a marketing opportunity to trade prospective clients for referral fees’.

Will the forces of deregulation close assist? It might be worth watching the progress of San Francisco-based legal services innovator Rocket Lawyer launching in the UK later this year. The US online legal document service only launched in 2008 but reckons to have had some 20m American customers last year. In recent months it raised $29m including backing from Google Ventures. The site styles itself as ‘the free legal document service’ and gives away hundreds of model letters, forms, agreements and templates. I spoke to its founder Charley Moore recently. He was mindful of setting up in ‘an environment of austerity where legal aid is being squeezed’. ‘What we are actually doing is satisfying a latent demand for legal services,’ he told me. ‘We are making the law accessible for people who would otherwise go without justice. No one can argue with that.’

Back to telephone advice, a 2010 report (Shopping Around, Jures) reflected the view that people do actually want face-to-face advice for legal services. It was unsurprising perhaps, that seven out of 10 consumers (72%) wanted to sit across the desk from our lawyer when seeking advice on a serious legal matter (divorce, for example). It was more of a surprise to see considerable reluctance to even draft a will or undertake a house move without seeing a lawyer. Almost three-quarters of those surveyed decided that was either important or fairly important (74%) to come into the office.

Plus those people eligible for legal aid include, by definition, some of the most disenfranchised: those who don't have a phone in their homes or a mobile (or can't afford the bills); the elderly and hard of hearing; those who don't speak English as a first language; plus those who simply want the reassurance of human contact. Plus, of course, not everyone is online. As of the end of last year, according to the Office for National Statistics, some 8.2m adults had never used the Internet.

The high satisfaction rates of CLA might sound impressive but the happiness of a telephone client doesn’t reflect quality of advice. Back in 2006 I conducted an admittedly rough and ready ‘mystery shopper’ test of CLA. We had a panel of experts reviewing advice given in 10 scenarios – you can read about it in an article I wrote for the Observer. Out of those 10 calls, six prompted detailed responses and, in four of those cases, further advice was needed. The results scored by a panel of legal experts were reasonably impressive (scoring at least seven out of 10), however, in two cases callers were prevented from taking the right course of action (both scoring two out of 10). On this snapshot, the advice seemed ‘somewhat variable’, noted Roger Smith, who was one of the judges. His main concern was that advisers seemed reluctant to refer callers on for face-to-face help. The LSC has to make sure that the helpline was ‘not just a mechanism for deterring demand’, Smith said.

Unfortunately, the gateway idea seems to be just that.