1.32You can sign up to the LAA’s email newsletter, which will provide you with updates, announcements and changes. The updates give you a brief summary of the issue, and a link to further information. They make keeping up much easier. You can subscribe through the LAA website at www.gov.uk. However, if you are really interested in keeping up to date, you cannot beat checking the website, and even particular pages, on a weekly basis, as the LAA does not always alert people to changes.

1.33The legal aid website is part of the gov.uk network and so follows the standard gov.uk layout and contents structure. This means that it can be hard to find what you need and the search function is often a good place to start, though only if you know the name of the document or page you need.

1.34Our website has a resources page at www.legalaidhandbook.com/laspo-resources, which contains links to the various regulations, contracts and most of the guidance documents on the LAA site, so that can be a good place to start if you don’t know the location of the item you are looking for.

1.35It is also well worth bookmarking the key pages within the LAA site – such as the forms, contracts and billing pages – so that they are easy to return to.

1.36One useful feature of the LAA site1www.gov.uk/government/organisations/legal-aid-agency. is the ‘latest’ section on the front page, which is automatically updated whenever any document or page on the LAA site is added or amended. The ‘see all’ link contains an RSS feed which can be added to a feed reader to alert you to any changes or newly published material on the LAA site. Our Twitter account (@legalaidhbk) is set automatically to tweet any new news items or content, so following it is another way of staying up to date.

1.37There is also a public information website on legal aid: www.gov.uk/legal-aid. Other useful public information sites are Advicenow: www.advicenow.org.uk and Adviceguide from Citizens Advice: www.adviceguide.org.uk.