LAA cyber-attack: lawyers bogged down by unpaid admin work

The cyber-attack on the Legal Aid Agency has left lawyers with significantly less time to support vulnerable clients because they are having to do more administrative work for free while the portal remains down, a prominent family lawyer has told justice minister Sarah Sackman KC MP.

Sackman attended the latest meeting of the all-party parliamentary group on access to justice this week, where Jenny Beck, director of family law specialist Beck Fitzegrald, explained the impact of the data breach on her firm, which does much domestic abuse work.

Beck said family lawyers play a key role in the government’s pledge to halve violence against women and girls by 2030, but are still waiting for ‘critical investment’ in family legal aid. ‘The only reason family legal aid survives is because some of the work can be done privately and firms cross-subsidise. On its own, family legal aid is entirely unsustainable. The data breach could be the final straw for practitioners,’ Beck said.

With the LAA portal down since May, Beck said staff were relying on telephone and paper for applications and case progression. All the work would need to be uploaded once the LAA’s system is restored.

Beck said staff were doing at least two hours’ extra work per case that the firm will not be able to claim for because the LAA’s costs assessment guidance treats claims for downtime or system slowness as office overheads, so the costs are not recoverable.

‘For a firm supporting 15 women feeling domestic abuse in a single week, this equates to 30 additional hours of unrecoverable work. That time cannot be absorbed, meaning fewer vulnerable clients assisted,’ Beck said.

Contingency arrangements for payments are ‘time consuming’ and the firm has ‘not once’ received the amount requested, making life difficult to financially plan, Beck added.

Sackman said she was ‘cognisant’ of the impact that the data breach was having on firms and staff at the Legal Aid Agency were ‘working round the clock doing their level best. ‘I’m aware that the IT systems are not user-friendly, place huge demands in terms of unpaid work which legal aid providers who have got a tough enough job meeting the needs of your clients. This is useful for me to take back,' Sackman said.

The ministry is discussing ‘transformation’ of legacy systems but ‘we’ve got to get through the immediate crisis so firms’ long-term prospects are not damaged but we also we need to make sure we learn from this', she added.