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A point not to be forgotten is the shrinking number of firms. In 2011 in my area there were 11 contracted firms, since last April there have been 5. High page count Crown Court cases are being used to subsidise every-day crime which runs at a loss (no matter how large your firm is). The cut in the number of pages in Crown Court litigators fees is a fee cut of around 15 -20% of the whole legal aid take of an average firm. The Law Society's JR of the decision to do this will fail as they always do for the usual reasons. The pain and damage from that cut is yet to be felt because of the nature of those cases but when it does it will shut down a large proportion of the remaining firms - and that's a very unhealthy situation to be in.