Family contracts quashed

Congratulations to the Law Society on the outcome of the JR and thank you for defending legal aid in a way which no individual legal aid firm could possibly afford. This is a historic judgment of which all members of TLS can justly feel very proud. It remains to be seen whether the LSC will now consult with the profession in a meaningful way and listen to the voices of our clients.

This judgment does not achieve what many are assuming. It does not end the strategy of the MoJ to greatly reduce the number of law firms handling legal aid contracts. All it does is make the MoJ even more eager to hurry up and bring the LSC inside as an executive agency, where upon, it will carry on with developing contract systems that demand far fewer law firms.

The main reason the Judge ruled in favour of the Law Soc was that quite obviously that the LSC had not given all the criteria details out before making decisions - and therefore that is a good and sensible ruling. But, the point about vulnerable people having to travel more if local law firms close is bogus and no solid reason for not culling law firms from legal aid contracts. In many areas public services have been closed down and forced local people to go further to gain a public service - Post Offices, police stations, dole offices, hospitals, schools, courts...the list goes on. A determined MoJ will defeat any challenge that stands only on the point about 'creating a greater need for travel'.

The MoJ will soon take the LSC under its wing, do the notifcation process for contract criteria properly and then will say that exactly the same number of law firms will miss out - and when people complain, it will say: 'Tough - this time we explained fully what our criteria were.' If the MoJ can argue that the firms it gives contracts too have sufficient capability to handle the matters then there is no argument that will win against them. The MoJ does not have, nor ever will have, a statutory responsibility to keep a private business afloat, i.e. a small law firm.

If I were a family lawyer - or a legal aid lawyer of any kind, I would not be popping the champagne but rather cheering the fact I have more time to think about the future and then start looking to find other law firms to merge with in order to protect myself from the coming, inevitable, changes. Anyone who thinks the MoJ is going to give up on this is naive - it is their formal and stated policy to cut legal aid spending and law firms by a huge amount.

I am really pleased by the outcome of yesterdays judgement, it means that next time there is such an exercise, at least people will be properly notified of the criteria and will be prepared.
I am astonished that people are still being so negative about this. Yes the government will make cuts but at least our firm can survive a little longer (after going for forty years) and we don't have to make all of our staff redundant.

Emmersons Law are absolutely spot on. The firms who bid speculatively were seeking to profit from other firms being axed, by being given the demised firms' clients who would have no choice but to go to the new firms, rather than the firms who had an established track record of serving the local community. I make no claims on the part of my own firm but did observe that in many areas some of the "loser" firms were firms of outstanding reputation and some of the "winner" firms far less so. Solicitors whose priority was providing a real service for their clients rather than studying how best to play the system were frequently the ones who lost out.

Any firm who stood to lose out from the judicial review could have sought to intervene on the side of the LSC (as the Creighton Group did on the side of the Law Society) In fact only one firm did as much as provide a statement supporting the LSC whereas a number of "winner" firms provided statements supporting the Creighton Group. In any case, it should have been apparent to the speculators when the Law Society first aounced the JR that they wouldn't necessarily have a smooth run, and they should have held off spending large sums of money until they knew the outcome.

On the day that judgement was given the court was packed and it was very encouraging to see representatives of some of the firms who had been successful in the bidding attending to give their support. There appear to be only a very small minority of practitioners who are genuinely aggrieved by this result

One very significant aspect of the history, as set out in the judgement, was that initially the LSC were saying that they would give preference to firms with a high supervisor to caseworker ratio, and then this was quietly dropped. Had they stuck to this far fewer, if any, quality firms would have been axed