Legal aid lawyers spend a quarter of their day on unbillable work, according to the Legal Aid Practitioners Group today. However, the figure is expected to be much higher now as the research was conducted in the months prior to the Legal Aid Agency cyber-attack.
LAPG embarked on the project, revealed by the Gazette, last year to gather robust empirical data on the hidden or non-chargeable costs of doing legal aid work. The research has been led by Garden Court Chambers' Dr Jo Wilding.
The findings are based on 84 employees working for eight private firms and two not-for-profits, who recorded the time they spent on chargeable time, non-chargeable time on casework activities and non-chargeable time on non-casework activities (management and administrative tasks) over 10 working days.
Every participant recorded some non-chargeable time, with the lowest averaging 10 minutes per day and the highest averaging seven hours 26 minutes. The mean was one hour 43 minutes.
The largest amount of time was spent on billing-related work, which averaged three hours 15 minutes over the 10-day period for every individual participant. The second-largest casework task was hard copy and electronic admin on individual files, averaging at two-and-a-half hours per participant over the 10 days.
Solicitor Jenny Beck, co-chair of LAPG and director of family practice Beck Fitzgerald, said she was not surprised to see that the highest category of non-chargeable tasks was related to billing.
Beck said: ‘Legacy LAA systems and regulations have not adapted and build in unnecessary and time-consuming steps. We need the LAA to have more trust in providers and develop more efficient processes. This study reveals the need for a root-and-branch review of process, coupled with a fee increase, if the sector is to become financially viable.’
Practitioners have been doing a lot more unpaid work than usual since a cyber-attack forced the LAA to take its main portal offline in May.
Beck told justice minister Sarah Sackman in July that staff at her firm, which does domestic abuse work, 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.
A copy of LAPG’s report has been sent to the Ministry of Justice and Legal Aid Agency, who are urged to increase fees so that chargeable time is better able to subsidise the non-chargeable time and amend guidance so that providers can claim for work carried out to deliver legal aid services.
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