Face-To-Face Contact: LSC plans to use audio-visual technologies in areas without community legal advice centres

Commitments by the Legal Services Commission (LSC) to providing face-to-face legal advice for those in need over the next five years will be increasingly fulfilled by virtual reality technologies, such as video-conferencing over the Internet using Webcams.


But firms wanting to gain legal aid work in rural areas will most likely have to invest in new technologies to be a part of this future, and they may not be able to afford it.



Following the release of the commission's strategy for the Community Legal Service (CLS) last week (see [2006] Gazette, 30 March, 3), Crispin Passmore, director of CLS, said virtual communication will play an 'increasing and increasingly significant role' in the future of face-to-face legal advice in non-urban areas.



In those areas where the population density is insufficient to justify the establishment of a community legal advice centre, the LSC plans to create networks of law firms and advisers connected using new technologies, especially audio-visual technologies such as Webcams.


'The phone is a great way of providing access in rural areas such as south-west Wales, but you've still got to reach into the rural poverty areas where people don't access services, even if they're available,' said Mr Passmore. 'And you've got to give the face-to-face contract providers responsibility to get into those communities and deliver services, and they can do that somewhere between [physical] face-to-face and phone by putting a Webcam and a general adviser into a community centre, with the Webcam for access to specialists.'


This will be no small task. The CLS currently deals with more than 625,000 cases face-to-face, while its telephone advice line CLS Direct in 2005/06 handled around 70,000, according to Mr Passmore. He said this is mainly because the telephone service is new and is being expanded 'as fast as we can build capacity for it'. Mr Passmore does not expect the number of cases being dealt with face-to-face to decline, but the range of services and number of cases overall, especially those dealt with by telephone, should increase.


Given that the CLS, in terms of financial help, will only get an extra £3 million to play with in 2006/07 and will, according to Mr Passmore, not get much more in coming years, a lot must be done within the budget - hence a move from 'real' face-to-face advice in rural areas to virtual conferencing.


This will affect law firms in non-urban areas in many ways, but from a technological standpoint it means that firms will need to equip themselves with appropriate systems.


Richard Miller, director of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, warned that this will cost money and that unless the government somehow comes up with funding to help, law firms will just walk away from the plans.


'It certainly seems to me that if firms are going to want to stay within the network they are going to be faced with making this investment,' he explained. 'But they will need assistance to do this from the LSC in one form or another, unless there are routes to co-funding.'


Something will need to worked out soon because the CLS plans to deliver these services by 2011, and Mr Passmore said there is no time to waste.


'I think the time has come to stop trying lots of new things and to take that learning we've already got and apply it to our core services,' he stressed. 'We have to integrate this into the mainstream delivery of legal advice services.'