Hitler discusses the legal aid reforms
Discussion
PRTVR said:
Pat H said:
Said a lot of good stuff
I understand your concern, but are they not the same as say a doctor in a hospital seeing his budget cut or schools having to manage on a reduced budget ?, we need to change and spend less money that we do not have, other countries spend a lot less and manage, I agree its not ideal but we have no choice in my opinion. PRTVR said:
I understand your concern, but are they not the same as say a doctor in a hospital seeing his budget cut or schools having to manage on a reduced budget ?, we need to change and spend less money that we do not have, other countries spend a lot less and manage, I agree its not ideal but we have no choice in my opinion.
re: the drug addict. Did attending at the police station achieve anything that could not have been done over the phone or by a clerk? PRTVR said:
I understand your concern, but are they not the same as say a doctor in a hospital seeing his budget cut or schools having to manage on a reduced budget? We need to change and spend less money that we do not have, other countries spend a lot less and manage, I agree its not ideal but we have no choice in my opinion.
Yep.I lost my Dad to cancer. And last year one of my kids needed major surgery.
If you ask me whether resources are better allocated to the NHS or to the legal aid budget then you will get the same answer as you would from 90% of the population.
I am realistic about the financial mess that this country is in and accept that criminal legal aid is a pretty low priority.
My beef is not whether savings are needed, but the process through which they will be achieved.
XCP said:
re: the drug addict. Did attending at the police station achieve anything that could not have been done over the phone or by a clerk?
On this occasion the attendance was justified. The punter was a schizophrenic and registered drug addict who had recently been released from prison.
I had never dealt with him before, so in my view it would not have been appropriate to cut him loose with just a phone call.
But if the punter had been one of my regular clients, whose problems I was familiar with and who knew and trusted me, then I have no doubt that the job could have been sorted out with a phone call.
It underlines one of the main problems with the govt's intended reforms.
At least half my work is repeat business. The punters trust me. They readily accept my advice. I don't waste hours building up a rapport or having to find out about all their problems.
Their last file may have a useful medical report on it which I can use again. And I will already know the details of their last couple of cases, because I dealt with them.
So you can see how much more difficult things will be if that continuity is deliberately broken by the proposed reforms.
Anyway, back the the police station...
These days we get a fixed fee for police station attendance. This is regardless of the seriousness of the offence, the experience of the lawyer who attends, or the time spent.
On this occasion I was in and out again in 45 minutes. That included disclosure, consultation, interview, charging decision and sorting out bail.
In the good old days when we charged by the hour, the total fee would have been about £50, including all the phone calls and travel.
Now there is a fixed fee. Which was £175.
Madness.
But it would still have been £175 if the investigation had taken all day to sort out.
Which is equally stupid.
We lawyers don't make the rules. We simply operate within the system which has been prescribed by previous govts, in accordance with the terms of contracts which they drew up.
The firms remain broadly the same as before the fixed fee system. The quality remains the same. It is the same lawyers dealing with the same cases.
It used to work perfectly well.
Then the gov't came along and buggered about with the way we get paid. And now they are moaning that it costs too much.
But instead of realising that the problem lies with the funding mechanism and not the firms of solicitors, the daft sods think that contracting with G4S somehow will provide the answer.
Take a good long look at GP's contracts and you will see exactly the same problems.
My late father was a GP. He was paid a decent wage, but was certainly not a wealthy man. He was very much the poor relation of the consultants.
Then along came the new contracting arrangements. The contracts provided them with a mechanism which could substantially increase their income.
And many GPs have taken advantage of these arrangements and are far better off than they were ten or fifteen years ago.
The common denominator to the inefficient use of public funds is not those at the coal face.
It is the goblins in Westminster who may have a noble cause, but whose policies of price competitive tendering and fixed fee structures are hopelessly ill conceived.
Trouble with this though is that the fixed fee system did bring the Legal Aid budget under control, its sat at roughly flat £2 Billion for years (6% drop at police stations and mags courts, 9% increase in crown court over ten years, civil has also dropped over that time by 3%) so has gone down in real terms.
Does not make a great headline though,"Massive legal aid budget must be cut even though it is lower now than it has been for the last 15 years in real terms"
Same with the fee schemes for crown court work it has brought prices under control, they have also stopped the rampant miss claiming (stealing) that was going on also.
My feeling is that Legal Aid rates are at the lowest they can go, the profession will simply stop doing the work which will cause chaos.
The law society should have some balls and Solicitor firms should simply, on mass, not sign the next set of contracts....you'll get what ever you want then.
Does not make a great headline though,"Massive legal aid budget must be cut even though it is lower now than it has been for the last 15 years in real terms"
Same with the fee schemes for crown court work it has brought prices under control, they have also stopped the rampant miss claiming (stealing) that was going on also.
My feeling is that Legal Aid rates are at the lowest they can go, the profession will simply stop doing the work which will cause chaos.
The law society should have some balls and Solicitor firms should simply, on mass, not sign the next set of contracts....you'll get what ever you want then.
PlankWithANailIn said:
Trouble with this though is that the fixed fee system did bring the Legal Aid budget under control, its sat at roughly flat £2 Billion for years (6% drop at police stations and mags courts, 9% increase in crown court over ten years, civil has also dropped over that time by 3%) so has gone down in real terms.
Does not make a great headline though,"Massive legal aid budget must be cut even though it is lower now than it has been for the last 15 years in real terms"
Same with the fee schemes for crown court work it has brought prices under control, they have also stopped the rampant miss claiming (stealing) that was going on also.
My feeling is that Legal Aid rates are at the lowest they can go, the profession will simply stop doing the work which will cause chaos.
The law society should have some balls and Solicitor firms should simply, on mass, not sign the next set of contracts....you'll get what ever you want then.
Go back to page 1 and see how much we pay compared to other countries,Does not make a great headline though,"Massive legal aid budget must be cut even though it is lower now than it has been for the last 15 years in real terms"
Same with the fee schemes for crown court work it has brought prices under control, they have also stopped the rampant miss claiming (stealing) that was going on also.
My feeling is that Legal Aid rates are at the lowest they can go, the profession will simply stop doing the work which will cause chaos.
The law society should have some balls and Solicitor firms should simply, on mass, not sign the next set of contracts....you'll get what ever you want then.
they manage, it will be different and people will have to adapt,as has been said on here every industry has had to go through it, now it is the time for the legal profession,you talk of not signing the next set of contracts, really that's so seventies,remember the unions and all the strikes, things have moved on.
I would have more respect if they got together and worked out a system that could work on the reduced income, but I suppose that would d be like turkeys voting for Christmas.
Yes, it is. Satire has long played a powerful role in public debate, in polities dating back to at least the fifth century BC (I would guess that you are unlikely to have read much Aristophanes). If you knew any history, you would know that.
The arguments caricatured in the piece sound pretty much like your "arguments", singlecoil.
The arguments caricatured in the piece sound pretty much like your "arguments", singlecoil.
10 Pence Short said:
With respect, our legal system is better than most other countries, and better usually costs more. We should aspire for as good a legal system as we can that is then cost effective, not a legal system that is cheap and as good as it can be in the circumstances.
But who is going to pay ? As a country we are borrowing massive amounts of money to keep afloat, nobody wants cuts but we have no choice, unless you think we should put up tax or shut down some hospitals ormaybe both to keep our legal system.
Breadvan72 said:
Buy a few fewer nukes, maybe? The savings here are marginal. The slack has already been cut from the system. It is now proposed to operate it on such a basis that it will fail to deliver its stated objectives.
Is that all you've got? You're quite handy at preaching to the converted (who are the only people who will be impressed by your earlier link, BTW), but when it come down to providing a solid reason as to why the Legal Aid budget should be exempt from cuts that are affecting every other are of public spending, it's 'buy a few fewer nukes'.Anyway, the cuts are coming like it or not, best the lawyers who will be affected (which will be most of them eventually, whether or not they currently do legal aid work) suck it up and make the best of it, just like everybody else.
Breadvan72 said:
Buy a few fewer nukes, maybe? The savings here are marginal. The slack has already been cut from the system. It is now proposed to operate it on such a basis that it will fail to deliver its stated objectives.
You say the slack has been cut from the system but has it, we are still paying 3 times most countries costs, something is wrong somewhere don't you think. A fewer nukes maybe, perhaps solicitors could start a campaign.... don't get a burglar alarm sign up to your local solicitor,it would stop your house getting burgled but we will help with the paperwork afterwards.
PlankWithANailIn said:
My feeling is that Legal Aid rates are at the lowest they can go, the profession will simply stop doing the work which will cause chaos.
I agree in part with this.The police station and magistrates court rates are pretty much nailed down as far as they can go.
The Crown Court rates are also nailed down for the run of the mill stuff. Counsel's fees for your average burglary or s47 assault are very low indeed.
But there is scope to chop the solicitors' rates for the more serious Crown Court jobs.
PlankWithANailIn said:
Same with the fee schemes for crown court work it has brought prices under control, they have also stopped the rampant miss claiming (stealing) that was going on also.
There was a lot of over claiming during the years before the fixed fees. Some firms hugely bulked up cases with unnecessary preparation work.Something had to be done. And the govt decided that fixed fees was the answer.
They arrived at the current fixed fees by taking the average claim per case, slicing a chunk off, and then applying it across the board.
But to the astonishment of many provincial solicitors, particularly those running smaller firms, the new fixed fees were far higher than we had ever claimed when working on an hourly basis.
Example:
Just before the fixed fees came into play, I represented a defendant in a pretty complicated murder. It was a multi handed case which ran to trial.
The head of our Crown Court dept worked flat out on the case.
So did I.
We did a really thorough job. No stone was left unturned and the punter received what I regarded as a really good service.
Our fee was about £33,000 net of disbursements and tax.
By the time the case ended, the fixed fee system had arrived. So out of curiosity, we punched the offence code, page count, length of trial etc etc into the fixed fee calculator to see what we would have been paid under the new system.
And the fee would have been £57,000....
So if that £57k represents a saving, then there were clearly firms out there who had been systematically milking the legal aid fund.
And that case wasn't a one off. Last year I was involved in two pretty big drugs conspiracies which both ran to trial.
The fixed fees were £35k and £43k respectively. On both occasions the cases were thoroughly prepared and, if paid on an hourly basis would have been at least 40% cheaper for the taxpayer.
So there is scope for significant savings to be made without touching the police stations, the lower courts, nor even the fees paid to counsel.
In fact, it really boils my piss.
The savings are there to be made. The defendants need not suffer and neither would the majority of hard working criminal solicitors.
Someone should have a look at what is spent on big drug conspiracy trials and their ilk. I wonder how much could be saved by halving the litigators' fees for those jobs? How much of a dent would it put in the total spend?
The current fixed fees paid for those cases are an unwelcome reminder of how comprehensively the fund was raped in the old days. They are the only part of the system where I believe that big savings can be made without any collateral damage.
Edited by Pat H on Friday 7th June 11:00
Pat H said:
Pat H .. said some more good stuff.
But Pat also revealed how his firm's variable cost fees were considerably less than the fixed cost fees which were "averaged less a chunk of Govt cost pre fixed fees".Seems to point to there being considerable truth in the school of thought that says we were being taken for a ride pre fixed fees. Hard to govern without auditors/quangos but a few sound poachers turned gamekeepers could have sorted that out (until the Wail got hold of it..)
The salaries do not sound great but some folk somewhere were coining it .. and they brought this upon the responsible lawyers. That seems part of the problem.. the bar knew there was a problem and the closed shop decided to ignore it .. politics then crudely cut into it and everyone get's hurt.
XCP said:
This 'punter' accused of murder. Was he/she acquitted?
NopeThis one was convicted, not that it makes much difference to the issue in hand
To put in some sort of context, we have dealt with six contested murder trials in the last ten years
Two were acquitted and four convicted
For what it's worth, all six had offered pleas to manslaughter
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