Having left her family law legal aid practice for the City, Gill Rivers says it is not for administrators to decide what is a worthy case

'Shirking and Sharking', in all their many varieties, have been shown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil, have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad cause, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some offhand manner, never meant to go right.

Jarndyce v Jarndyce, Bleak House, Charles Dickens




Even a cursory glance at the reforms of legal aid leaves one with an overwhelming sense of inevitability. Legal aid practitioners had already heard the death knell tolling as the Legal Services Commission coerced practitioners into believing that the only way forward was to become franchised and, for no additional remuneration, effectively to administer the legal aid funds.


The outcome? An absolute decline in the number of solicitors' practices prepared - or indeed able to afford - to offer any form of publicly funded help to prospective clients. In the years that followed, more practices determined that it was not possible to offer legal aid services as a result of the overly burdensome nature and cost of the requirements to be franchised. Now significantly fewer than half of solicitors' firms in England and Wales can offer legal aid.


I have practised family law for 12 years, and half of those were spent working in a practice that offered legal aid. I witnessed the demise of the services I could make available to my deserving clients. Increasingly, the commission ratcheted up the administrative burdens on solicitors who wanted to maintain the franchises they had struggled so hard to obtain. At the same time, the financial remuneration for those solicitors has not increased by anything other than a derisory amount.


I, along with the majority, finally abandoned my legal aid practice.


Notwithstanding the constraints, there are, to their credit, a few solicitors left in the country who are prepared to offer legal aid services; one wonders how they survive.


In recent years, I have attended the Citizens Advice Bureau at the Principal Registry of the Family Division in London and given my time pro bono - perhaps in an attempt to salve my own conscience. It is with increasing astonishment that I have realised the swingeing legal aid cutbacks I experienced five years ago have now deepened (see [2005] Gazette, 25 June, 4).


Clearly there are already many people who are denied access to justice because of the potential cost of the process to them. The proposed reforms do little more than tighten the noose around the neck of the potentially publicly funded client.


Returning to Bleak House, should solicitors now step forward together to push back against the continued cutbacks? It is, after all, the duty of a solicitor not only to implement, but to challenge. Should we stand united against the proposed reforms, or should we adopt a stance of resignation as anticipated in Jarndyce?


If this country purports to have a system of assistance with funding for litigation, then let it be an adequate and functioning system and not a sham. Let us not arrive at a situation whereby experienced and qualified solicitors are no longer able to determine whether or not a client has a case that is worth pursuing.


The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, in Cowl and others v Plymouth City Council [2001] EWCA Civ 1935 stated: 'Insufficient attention is paid to the paramount importance of avoiding litigation whenever this is possible.' This is not in doubt, but surely we cannot allow regulatory bodies, staffed by administrators, to determine when it is appropriate to pick up a sword or a shield.


Gill Rivers is a family law specialist consultant solicitor at City-based law firm Charles Russell