Ratings: more categories of law covered by quality control

Legal aid solicitors have this week welcomed the Legal Services Commission's (LSC) finalisation of the peer review process as a way of ending contract compliance auditing.


The LSC has decided to forge ahead with its new regime after consultation showed that peer review was popular among firms; at present, there are about 80 peer reviewers working across nine categories of law including crime, family and immigration. More will now be recruited and categories of law added.


However, the LSC has made amendments to its original scheme, such as strengthening the representations process. A senior panel member, taken from the existing panel of peer reviewers, will now consider representations against a review rating if there is a dispute.


Peter Watson, LSC director of the supplier development group, said the commission was confident that peer review could now provide the foundation for its preferred supplier strategy. 'It enables the LSC to ensure that clients are receiving high quality legal advice,' he said. 'Peer review has been recognised by the profession as the best mechanism to assess the quality of work conducted by providers and is supporting the development of other "quality of advice" tools, for example, file assessment and quality profiles.'


Legal Aid Practitioners Group director Richard Miller backed the move. 'We consider that peer review is a major step forward from auditing, because it measures quality directly, and is carried out by qualified solicitors,' he said. 'Moreover, because the system is independent of the LSC, there should be no suspicion that audit decisions are in any way driven by budgetary considerations.'


He added: 'One of our major concerns in the original consultation was that we did not think the review and representation process was sufficiently robust. We are very pleased with the improvements made.'