The secret diary of a legal aid solicitor: the day-to-day story of a high street practitioner
An anonymous legal aid solicitor suspects that the community action which is being deployed to halt the closure of the local library would not be present to save the high street’s solicitors’ firms from shutting down because of the cuts.
Last night I attended a meeting at a local church in aid of the ‘Save the library’ campaign. My local library has been under threat from property developers for years; fortunately, a concerted, energetic and well-supported campaign by local people has ensured that the developers get some of their ‘Yuppie flats’, but they give us some space for a community library. Through gritted teeth, it is true; however, we still get our space and that is a victory for the campaign.
What impressed me was the fact that 300 people would turn up for a meeting (with the first episode of BBC 1’s ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ as competition for bums on seats) and not only speak and contribute, but buy raffle tickets to support the cause and give of their very valuable time.
How many of the public (let’s forget about lawyers for the moment), would turn up to a meeting to support a solicitors’ firm or barristers’ chambers? Sadly, I suspect that it would be very few: libraries capture the imagination, lawyers do not.
Yet, like the Siberian tiger, the Arabian oryx and the Iberian lynx, legal aid lawyers are looking extinction in the eye. We are a very precarious species and becoming rarer all the while. The number of firms doing legal aid is dropping constantly and will continue to go down in the coming years.
My legal aid revenues are beginning to diminish as, of course, they had to given the rigours of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. Yet, the rigours of legal aid audits are even more extreme: the paperwork we have to plough through is much more difficult and time consuming.
As I write this column, I am told that all the paper forms are about to be torn up, and we will be making legal aid applications online ‘quite soon’; however, because of difficulties in the pilot in the North East, nobody knows when this project will go live. There is a fear that the new system will make matters more difficult rather than easier.
Some of my younger legal aid lawyers are desperately looking for a way out: seeking jobs with local authorities or looking to retrain into conveyancers or commercial litigators. No one wants to stay and make a long-term career in the legal aid business.
And that is where we are looking at a very serious problem indeed. It may not be fast upon us, it may take ten years to materialise, but sooner or later the current crop of partners are going to retire and there will be nobody queuing up to replace them: there will be a void and, sadly, a void that will not be replaced.
All of a sudden, the greatest legal aid system in the world will wither and die. Perhaps then the community, the public and those who need a lawyer will realise that there was a cause they should have been fighting for.