The Lord Chancellor's Department (LCD) has recently sent to the Law Society revised proposals for standard fees for legally aided family litigation and advocacy.

Practitioners will need to consider their business plans for family work with the best available information, even though much yet remains to be discussed with LCD about the structure and fee levels.The Society has always doubted whether family cases are capable of the standardisation the government is determined to promote.

It has sought to identify what criteria must be met before any standard fees system could be workable.

For example: the cases themselves must be reasonably predictable in terms of the amount of work needed; separate fees need to be set for each main category of case to be covered by standard fees; standard fees must be set at a level which enables practitioners to do the work properly; and there must be sensible escape clauses, so that maximum gains and losses in individual cases are not excessive.I met with the Geoff Hoon, minister of state at the LCD, earlier this year to set out the Society's position on previous proposals and agreed to put differences to one side to see whether it was possible to devise a sensible structure which acknowledged different categories of case.

Our negotiating team includes experienced legal aid family practitioners and officials.We acknowledge that LCD has tried to correlate their data with that of the Legal Aid Board.

It has now provided more categories of fees and has begun to address the need to make adequate payment for multiple category cases, but there is still a long way to go.One of the main flaws in the proposed structure remains the treatment of solicitor advocacy.

The proposals ignore the fact that many solicitors dealing with family cases do their own advocacy, often at the client's request.

The fees for advocacy must reflect the work done and not the identity of the advocate, just as in Crown Court advocacy.It is not clear how the government proposes to take account of changes in law since 1994, including the treatment of ancillary relief pilot cases.

KPMG research shows the costs profiles of cases conducted under the pilot procedure are different from those drawn from LCD's survey.Public law children cases are another area of concern.

Can it be right, when the welfare of the child is the court's paramount consideration, that the work is controlled by a standard fee?In the absence of any up-to-date survey by LCD and in view of our continuing doubts about the statistical validity of the revised proposals, we are pressing the government to check its proposals by sampling current legal aid bills over a period of time.

In the meantime, the Society is preparing its own survey of practitioners in case the government prefers to move ahead without checking the proposals against current bills.If the government is set on introducing standard fees, the Society must ensure they are introduced on as sound a basis as possible and that they are workable in practice in order to encourage high quality work.

Without that, clients will not be able to find the representation they need.

Practitioners' income must not be cut to such a level that it would be impossible to do a competent job in any but the simplest case.