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.