Criminal defence tendering: a tipping point

Genesis - I agree with your post, but I wouldn't hold your breath! As a solicitor woking in a small practice in a market town, I find myself asking virtually on a daily basis, what are the Law Society doing for us? Since the inception of the SRA et al, they do not regulate me, etc. They bow and scrape to those in power and only appear to listen to the "magic circle" firms. Rarely do I see any representative in the media, with any balls, robustly defending our profession despite the fact that litigation as we know it is under significant threat from the current regime.

PI solicitors are about to have their businesses and income shafted. Did the Law Soc go on a publicity campaign on behalf of the lawyers, pointing out the bleeding obvious, namely that there is no possibility that by doing this it would cut insurance premiums? No.

Did the Law Soc take to our screens and airwaves and let the public know the true impact there will be when Public Funding is cut from the vast majority of family matters from next month? Did they point out to the right wing, Tory loving press the process involved in divorce and the fact that divorce lawyers never make money from public funding and that you would pay a car mechanic more than the rates on offer, but even those lowly rates will disappear? No.

Will the Law Soc take to our screens and airwaves and let the world know just how insidious the proposals are in so much as that "tendering" for criminal work means that in reality (and working from the family tendering process debarcle) the contracts will go to whoever offers to do it cheaply, regardless of quality of advice on offer and qualification, let alone location? I doubt it.

Yes I am disgruntled and bitter and twisted and quite frankly am fed up with the recent trend of solicitor bashing. To the Law Soc - turn off the lights on your way out!

According to the SRA 26% of fees are paid to the Law Society. How about we all deduct 26% of our fees from the 2013/2014 payment on the basis of incompetence!

So if you are an MP or married to one (or were), or the son of a government minister you can be properly represented by a fully qualified lawyer in criminal proceedings brought against you.
If you are a mere British citizen facing a government paid for investigation and prosecution you might be able to instruct a stack 'em high sell 'em cheap (cost and quality) sausage factory paid for by the government if you are on hard times or vulnerable.
At least at the moment you will be looked after by a dedicated criminal law specialist with a social conscience who is prepared to suffer financially for what he/she believes in.
And what happened to the idea of Justice?

We are not obliged to be members of the Law Society
All the time we tell each other how useless it is but we do nothing about it nothing changes
Parliament will not change its stance. It thinks lawyer bashing is ok because the media have been doing it for years and we have done nothing about that, so we are an easy target (like smokers)
We have for the most part been unable to afford to stop providing our services
Obviously the government of the day (whoever it is) will continue to squeeze us all the time we tolerate it, or cannot afford to do anything about it
There is no appetite for the poor to have access to justice - (let them eat cake/mediation/complaints systems/ombudsmen) the taxpayer cannot afford to help losers with rights/ they must be strivers and learn responsibilities

Once we recognise the above we will stop fighting and either
a) go on the Liverpool care pathway to solicitor oblivian or
b) think up new ways to succeed

Which shall we do and has anyone any good ideas?

We are getting what - £220 approx. per police station attendance? How about getting together and placing a bid for £320 or 420 per police station? That would have taught them a lesson!

We have to fight back!!!!

Unfortunately there will be firms who would be prepared to undercut a reasonable honest bid, based on the true value of the work involved.

Rarely, if ever does a misscarriage of justice cost politicians votes. There might be cases that prod deeply at society's complacency and even change the conventional wisdom, Stephen Lawrence would an example, so too Hillsborough. However, the issues at stake here challenge entrenched perceptions and practices by certain institutions and indeed the public. They are concerns beyond the normal nuanced tussles of mainstream party politics and therefore do not really enter the calculus for assessing how much Government should compromise on legal aid.

Governments well know that 'misscarriage of justice is a highly flexible and nebulous concept.
It is only really brought into focus in very serious cases, such as murder, where an innocent defendant may face many years in prison. Of course there are the many individual tragedies of an individual wrongly convicted for dishonesty etc who then finds his/her emplyment prospects compromised. It must also apply to victims as well as offenders. Chief police officers are well aware of their funding constraints in how they decide to prioritise categories of criminal investigation. A simple, but good example might be the numbers of people passing through a county on the way to a pop festival. By eight in the morning the police may have stopped one hundred vehicles and arrested fifty people for possession of cannabis. By ten in the morning the cells throughout the county are full to capacity and there are no officers available either to process the burgeoning number of suspects or get on with other business. The chief officer then tells his officer to cease stopping or arresting anyone and let them proceed to the festival. Similar, though perhaps less dramatic choices are no doubt often present in relation to burglaries and a whole host of other offences.

There is also an inflated view of the jury system as a bastion of fairness. Even the jury system has its limitations. It is time consuming, imprecise, arbitrary and expensive. It gives eloquent public school boys and girls an opporunity to spout their oratory in court, but is it really that much better than other cheaper systems?

There may well be a role for greater inquisitorial discretion to judges in tandem with juries, perhaps this is already with us in substance and practise? This will reduce a great deal of time and lessen dependence on adversarial criminal lawyers.

In challenging legal aid reform there is a risk that the clients case and best interests are subverted to the cause of self-interest as criminal defence lawyers seek to preserve what was their little empire, but is now their scratching for a livelihood.

This is not and will not be a tipping point for two simple reasons.
First, we will not stand together as a group because we never do. Too many firms see this sort of situation as an opportunity to grab their competitors' clients if they can get iin first. You all know this is what will happen.
Secondly, the Law Society lacks the guts to instruct its members not to sign up to the digital working that Grayling says will be a pre-requisite to tendering. The Society is not advising any of us to sign up - quite rightly as there is absolutely no benefit to solicitors or defendants in doing so, the system regularly fails in our local Court and if the security is at the level currently being touted by our local police and CPS office to sign up would involve a considerable down-grade of our present security settings!
There is a world of difference between instructing us not to sign up - which is what is required and what would undermine Grayling's expressed intent - and not advising us to sign up at the present time - or sitting in the fence.
The Society that presents itself as representing our interests has an opportunity to take a meaningful lead. Will it? Somehow I doubt it.

The Goverment is detroying Legal Aid and without it normal citizens will have no recourse against the overwhelming might of The State. We must fight for legal aid, for without it justice will be in the hands of the current politicians! They don't want opposition. I do not think these proposals for competitive tendering has cost saving in mind. What it is, is something more, something part of a whole. I will give an example of how they work: Let's take the abolition of committal fees in the magistrates court.
1. The starting point. The fee payable was a standard fee in the magistrates court graded into either a lower, higher or non standard fee.
2. Most solicitors billed lower standard fees for this type of work, so we did not see any issue with only having lower standard fees paid for work done and it becomming part of the crown court litigator fee bill. What you should have seen is a plan to eliminate the fee.
3. The goverment and LSC now in position to move to abolish the fee removes it in October 2011
4.Now they can argue that the fee is not an elimination of a fee ( thus the removal of a magsitrates court fee) but a lowering of crown court fee. This is what he Court accepted in the judicial review application so bravely brought by te Law Society.

We must stop being led by our noses and wake up and smell the coffee! TIME TO FIGHT FOR LEGAL AID

and just two more things. The amount of times I have heard you cannot fight the system and luckily I am of the age that I am soon to retire, in courts by fellow solicitors is just incredible.

IF WE CANNOT FIGHT FOR OURSELVES HOW DO WE DARE TO STAND UP FOR OTHERS. IT'S TIME, WE ARE 7000 LAWYERS NOT SHEEP, WE ARE THE WOLVES AND WE NEED TO START ACTING LIKE THEM. THEY WILL TREAT US AND PLAN FOR US LIKE WE ARE SHEEP UNTILL THEN!

As a decades long member of the Labour Party it is touching to see the impassioned pleas and bleatings about PCT that I hear from many of my Leicestershire Criminal Legal Aid 'colleagues'.

Given their allegiance to the Conservative Party , free enterprise, efficiency and the market I am surely comforted that their purported and newly discovered capacity to act collectively is born not out of self interest but as a love for society as a whole.

If the blue voting band above see that the writing is on the wall why is it the Law Society has remained silent in the media about Criminal Legal Aid and for that matter on the effective removal of Legal Aid from Family work?
There is not much point in the Gazette only preaching to the converted.

Max Clifford will be cheap at the moment why not give him a call?