A prominent Liverpool firm is laying the groundwork for a class action against the government to secure compensation for people whose data was breached in a cyber attack on the Legal Aid Agency’s systems, the Gazette has learned.

Broudie Jackson Canter states on its website that it is preparing a group litigation order against the government to seek compensation for legal aid applicants whose information was exposed.

After shutting down its systems in May, the LAA confirmed that data going back to 2007 may have been accessed as well as information linked to the partners of applicants. The data that may have been accessed includes contact details and addresses, date of birth, national insurance number, criminal history, employment status and financial data.

Broudie Jackson Canter states it is acting on a ‘no win, no fee’ basis. Other firms taking on potential claims include Express Solicitors, KP Law and HNK Solicitors.

The LAA has yet to confirm how many people's data has been breached.

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LAA deputy chief executive Jane Harbottle told the House of Commons public accounts committee in October that a precise number was difficult to provide because of the way the LAA’s systems are structured and data is stored.

‘We have 48 different systems, we’ve got 120 different components, all house various pockets of data. The data appears as a number of transactions, so there’s no whole [legal aid file] that could have been extracted. There is no file. It appears in a series of different transactions in different buckets in different parts of the system,' Harbottle told MPs.

The Law Society has been pushing for solicitors to be compensated for the disruption they have endured after the systems required to log work and get paid were shut down. The Ministry of Justice has ruled out a separate compensation route for solicitors, directing practitioners to its LAA 'complaints procedure' page.