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This month, an anonymous legal aid solicitor writes about delays in payment:
My bank manager and accountants are always slightly bemused by the arithmetic of legal aid. ‘So, can I just get this right? You get paid an average of £65 an hour doing legal aid work but, if you see a private client, you can earn £250 an hour or more?’ says the bank manager, scratching his head. ‘Why do you do this very badly paid work?’ asks my accountant, with a confused expression on his face. Because this is why I came into this profession. I wanted to work for people who could not afford to pay lawyers. I felt good about the work I was doing. I was making a difference to people’s lives in a very good way.
Oddly enough, it is not so much the ridiculously low rates of pay that rankle, but the sheer bureaucracy, paper-pushing and struggle to get paid. Recently, for all kinds of weird and wonderful reasons, the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) has started rejecting massive numbers of bills submitted for payment. It started with a blitz on counsel’s year of call. Every bill submitted with fee-notes without counsel’s year of call was rejected, even though that is public information. The LAA is now rejecting bills for many other reasons. It sometimes wants to see files of papers even with a claim1 worth only a few hundred pounds. In one recent case where, in a disrepair matter, we agreed that damages of £250 could be set off against some rent arrears, the LAA triumphantly said that the statutory charge applied!
While it is depressing to be paid peanuts for hard, complex and very demanding legal work, it is even more frustrating to be kept out of payment because the LAA has been told to tighten up on how much it pays us and how quickly.
I use an expert in-house costs draftsman to prepare my bills. She goes through the legal aid checklist meticulously and it is rare that my bills are rejected for wrong rates or obvious problems. Quite a number of the bills submitted have already been assessed by the court but now the LAA is challenging those bills as well. Despite the fact that the bill has been assessed, the LAA is having a second bite at the cherry and coming up with a plethora of excuses as to why payment should not be made. This is unusual. In the past we used to have a fight with a costs judge or a taxing official; now we have a fairly amicable relationship with the court and it is the LAA which is doing its utmost not to pay and to procrastinate.
This begs a lot of questions. Why should we be treated in this lamentable fashion? What have we as a profession done to deserve this? True, it is public money but the vast majority of legal aid practitioners are decent people doing a difficult job for low pay. We are not a bunch of gangsters seeking to defraud the government.