What’s Goin’ On

Andy is away in the sun, as many of you will know, and so I am dealing with significantly more phone queries. Alongside that I have just prepped tomorrows Webinar on SQM developments – its not an exciting one but will save the participants a couple of hours reading.
It has been a right mixed bag too, costs, green form scope, civil procurement, a brave young man wanting to set up his own crime firm, Court of Appeal funding for a QC and an highly interesting training enquiry.
Two of those involve firms wanting to set up new offices in the current state of play. The unintended consequence of these so called “market based reforms” does of course mean that the at present the LSC have a cold dead hand over both the CDS and CLS market. New contract requests are rejected out of hand despite any reasonable assessment of need and everything stultifies. The clients I was with yesterday teatime are regularly being asked by CAFCASS to take cases from outside their “procurement area”, in a separate LA. They are doing so and obviously, and quite rightly, getting public funding – yet a request to open a new office to facilitate this – well you can guess the answer. These are not “market based” reforms they are increasingly, plainly daft.