Lawyers in spotlight over 22m legal bill for asylum

The rest of the world may be rumbling inescapably towards war, but the law pages of the national media stick to what they know best.

The Daily Express obviously thought that a diet of the familiar was needed in these troubled times, and it splashed with the claim that 'the legal aid bill for Britain's asylum and immigration system has soared to more than 22 million a year' (10 March).

Taxpayers are apparently funding 'a small army of judges, lawyers and court staff' to deal with the '110,000 refugees who arrived in 2002'.

However, said the newspaper, even these 'huge' figures 'vastly underestimate the true cost of the asylum legal system', which also includes the 'multi-million pound cost of acquiring and running the appeal centres'.

The Sunday Telegraph reported another tale of a lawyer daring to charge for his services, with word that of the 1.2 million raised to finance a civil suit aimed at bringing the Omagh bombers to justice, 'most of it is gone...all but drained by legal fees' (9 March).

The solicitors' firm in question, H2O, has already billed the charity fund for 800,000, and according to estimates could charge another 340,000 by the time the trial is over.

This, added to counsels' costs, means that the final fees paid to lawyers 'could total 1.6 million', even though all involved are working for 'heavily discounted rates'.

The paper says haughtily that 'it is difficult for a non-lawyer to understand how it can possibly cost nearly 1 million to put legal flesh on a skeleton of a case given to them by the BBC'.

It also points out that the firm's lead partner, Jason McCue, 'has recently moved into a house in one of the most expensive parts of London with his partner, the television presenter Mariella Frostrup'.

H2O provided the Sunday Telegraph with an explanation of its fees, but said that it was not for publication.

In the past, Mr McCue has said that he has not charged the fund for everything that he was entitled to, and according to an associate he has spend 'hundreds of hours on the case which have never been reflected in the bills'.

There was some high-octane glamour, at least by association, in the Guardian's admiring profile of 'the most feared lawyer in Britain', the 'world-weary' but 'brilliant' Keith Schilling, who has 'the air of a beleaguered Kiefer Sutherland when things are going badly in 24' (17 March).

Mr Schilling, along with his 'expensively coloured hair', has carved a niche for himself as the 'injunction king', and is the 'first point of call for any celebrity having a spot of bother with the press'.

Clients of his include Angus Deayton, Jamie Theakston, Ulrika Jonsson and Naomi Campbell, all of whom have 'shelled out his sizeable hourly rate...

to menace, correct, cajole and otherwise influence the popular press'.

Not bad going, the paper admits, for someone whose 'mother worked in Sainsbury's and whose father was unemployed'.

Mr Schilling would doubtless be interested in US foreign policy hawk Richard Perle's views on English libel law, which he expressed last week.

Mr Perle is suing journalist Seymour Hersh over an article which appeared in the New Yorker magazine implying that Mr Perle was using his position as a Pentagon adviser - he chairs the Pentagon's defence policy board - to benefit financially from the war in Iraq.

In what must rate as something of a backhanded compliment, Mr Perle told the New York Sun that he was launching legal action on this side of the Atlantic because 'it is easier to win such cases there because the burden on plaintiffs is so much less'.

And finally, Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr tells the case of 60-year-old lawyer Stephen Downs, arrested last week in a US shopping mall for wearing a T-shirt saying 'Give peace a chance'.

Security guards approached Mr Downs and told him to remove the T-shirt or leave the mall; when he refused, police were called and he was arrested for trespassing.

'What a strange pass we have come to,' said Mr Pitts (10 March).

'Here on war's eve people are saying all sorts of things you never thought you'd hear - some say we must strike a nation that has not struck us, and others say that nuclear weapons are not out of the question.

How ironic that a shopping mall would decide that it is Stephen Downs who has said the one thing that ought not to be said.

Peace.'

Victoria MacCallum