I did not get to see this article until last night. For those without the time or inclination to read it in summary it raises concern about the decline in the Legal Aid supplier base. Not a new story but one it is nice to see in the mainstream media.
The LSC response employs their sadly too common defence:
“The most important figure is the number of people receiving help from legal aid, which is at a record high, not the number of lawyers carrying out the work”.
These continuing attempts to establish volume of “acts of advice and assistance” as the schemes key performance indicator must be resisted, especially in a funding regime which implicitly encourages firms to take on more, lower value cases. Their fundamental statutory duty is to guarantee access to justice via quality assured supply not to monitor, arguably manipulate, a single, largely meaningless figure as a fig leaf for all the other at least equally vital measurements.
Link (word doc) to survey, which formed the basis of the article.
Ta for that – interesting.