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20.12You are entitled to be paid your costs on civil certificates at the end of the case following assessment by the LAA or court – see chapter 13 for details. In recognition of the fact that such cases often last a considerable time and costs can be substantial, there is provision for you to claim payments on account during the life of the case.
20.13The Standard Civil Contract 2013 entitles you to claim a payment on account of profit costs at any time, provided that a) you may not apply for the first until three months have elapsed since the certificate was issued, and b) you may not apply more than twice in any 12-month period. Also, cumulatively, you are not entitled to be paid more than 75 per cent of your profit costs to date
1Standard Civil Contract 2013 Specification para 6.22., (or standard fee in applicable Family cases
2Standard Civil Contract 2013 Specification para 7.25.) You can make a payment on account for disbursements incurred, or about to be incurred, at any time.
3Standard Civil Contract 2013 Specification para 6.21.Case study
It is 1 May 2017. I have two certificate files. On the first, the certificate was issued on 1 February 2017 and I have spent £1,000. On the second, the certificate was issued on 1 April 2016. I have spent £5,000 in total, and I received a payment on account of £2,000 in January. Am I entitled to any payments on account? If so, how much?
The first certificate was issued exactly three months ago, so you are entitled to a payment on account. The second was issued more than three months ago and you have only made one application in the 12 months leading up to today, so you are entitled to a payment on account.
Payments on account have to be submitted using CCMS where – as here – the case is a CCMS case. You should complete a separate POA claim for each certificate. Once you have done so, CCMS will send you a notification asking you to upload your running record of costs. This must match your claim exactly. You should upload a copy of the record and mark the notification as ‘documents sent’ so it is picked up by a caseworker. The LAA will not assess your claim but will check that it matches the running record. Provided it does in each case, you will be paid £750 on the first case and £1,750 on the second (75 per cent of £5,000, less the £2,000 already paid).
If the certificate was issued before CCMS became mandatory (February 2016 for care cases and April 2016 for all other cases) you should send in a single paper POA1 form, completing one line for each case, or you could opt to make a POA application online using an eform:
www.gov.uk/legal-aid-eforms. There is no requirement to submit a copy of your record of costs in either case.
Payments on account should be paid into your office account (Specification para 6.26).
20.14Payments on account are re-payable at the end of the case. When each case concludes and the bill is assessed, the LAA will pay the value of the bill and then recoup the payments on account, so that the net effect is that you are paid only the outstanding balance. Where you receive costs from the other side in part or in full, you should notify the LAA even where you are making no claim for legal aid costs so that payments on account can be recouped.
Payment on account limits
20.15Paragraph 6.24 of the Specification entitles the LAA to impose a maximum payment on account limit. This would be set in each individual contract schedule, and could vary from category of law to category of law, and indeed from firm to firm.
20.16The limit is calculated by comparing the value of debits (payments to you) as against credits (claims received) on your account with the LAA. The maximum amount by which debits are allowed to exceed credits is the maximum payment on account limit, and once the limit is reached the LAA would refuse to make any further payments on account and would require repayment of the excess.
20.17However, although this clause is in the contract, no schedules currently specify a limit and the LSC undertook not to introduce one without further consultation when the Unified Contract was introduced in 2007. The power in the 2013 contract is discretionary, and the LAA have, at the time of writing, given no indication of whether or in what circumstances they intend to introduce the limit.