Law firms have effectively become the Legal Aid Agency’s 'bank' and the strain on their cashflow will get worse if jury trials are curbed, newly released minutes of a legal aid stakeholder forum have revealed.
The need for interim payments to cover upfront costs such as experts' fees was raised by practitioners at January’s meeting of the Crime Contract Consultative Group.
Andrew Cosma, senior partner of Martin Murray & Associates, told officials that high expert disbursement fees in magistrates’ court cases often exceed the legal fees and must be paid upfront, 'causing cash flow issues for practitioners'. Law Society policy adviser Alice Mutasa said the situation will get worse under the government's jury trial reforms, as more serious cases will stay in the magistrates’ court, leading to longer waits and more upfront payments for experts.
Solicitor Mark Newby highlighted a similar problem for prison law providers, who incur 'significant costs' such as transcript fees for Court of Appeal cases that are not repaid until the case has been resolved. Newby gave his own example of paying nearly £6,000 for transcripts in a modern slavery case.
Former London Criminal Courts Solicitors' Association president Fadi Daoud said firms were acting as the LAA’s ‘bank’, paying for disbursements upfront and only being reimbursed later, which 'resulted in a loss of value due to inflation'.
Practitioners called for interim payments. However, according to minutes for a meeting in March, LAA officials said ‘ongoing system instability, exacerbated by the cyber incident prevents the implementation of additional interim payment options without deprioritising other critical recovery, policy and transformation work’.
But a glimmer of hope remains. After Legal Aid Practitioners Group policy director Kate Pasfield pointed out that interim payments were successfully introduced for inquest cases during the pandemic, the LAA agreed to review the situation again.
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