Even if your firm does not undertake legal aid work, please don’t switch off. Although I want to query just what the Legal Services Commission’s intentions are with regard to electronic working, there are implications in what I have to say for the Courts Service, the Tribunals Service and other organs of the state that expect law firms to bow to their dictats regarding the completion of forms.

The LSC has, from 1 June, introduced changes that affect 28 forms. One of these is a new form CLSPOA1 for claims for payments on account, which replaces form CLSCLAIM4. The new form looks very different from the old one, but most of the information required is much the same as in the old form, the principal difference being that the new form can be used to make claims in up to 15 matters, whereas the old form was for one matter only.

You might think that it is a good thing that 15 forms can be condensed into one. But if you have invested in case management systems that can automate production of a claim form in each matter, you will realise that a matter-based case management system is incapable of populating a form with data other than those produced by a single matter.

The LSC says that the form was introduced after a successful pilot with ‘a number of providers’. Just who were these providers and how do they usually produce their forms? If they write them out by hand, then no doubt a single form dealing with up to 15 claims is very good news for them. But for firms operating in a modern way, the change is irrelevant, although sadly they have to spend time and money in reprogramming the new form to do what the old one did.

The LSC is introducing compulsory electronic interaction with suppliers from April next year. Why then are they introducing changes to forms that benefit only firms that have not yet participated in the digital age? Could it be that it suits the LSC very well to deal with multiple claims in one form, regardless of what this means for the supplier?

I have written about the LSC mission to impose electronic working in law firms here. In that article I give examples of a failure to consider the poor old solicitor when introducing new forms, whether they are produced by the LSC, the Courts Service or the Tribunals Service. When will those institutions start to take account of the considerable investment that firms have made in IT?