Peer Review is quickly becoming the issue of the month this trend continuing with my viewing of a second "Below Competent" outcome. The files, in a civil category, seem perfectly competent to me.

It seems worth briefly commenting upon three themes this reveiw has in common with this case.

The "feel" of the negative comments in both was that the reviewer worked in an entirely different jurisdiction and context.

The use of generic client care letters (especially those which have slipped slightly out of date) is seriously frowned upon.

The other factor which struck me was that these were highly subjective, unnecessarily aggressive assessments. Lets hope that as these cases are monitored a more realistic standard emerges.

Our mini training tour starts today.

Places still available.

A bit like the advice not to work with children and animals is that about when and where to discuss politics - in this case not in a work related blog. I could not however pass this article by especially as it refers to "lawyers". The (offending) paragraph reads as follows:

Not surprising, then, that at a recent meeting in London of a Muslim group, the anger was visceral. This was not some radical fringe group, but the "cream of the Muslim educated elite, as assimilated as it is possible to be", as one participant described the 100-strong audience of lawyers, accountants, teachers and the like. But "enough is enough" was the comment from the floor that attracted the applause, as did the threat that "we will react without the shackles of rationality, regardless of the consequences".

Now I know quite a few Muslim lawyers and I find it hard to believe that any of them would "react" in such a way. Maybe someone would like to put Madeline right on the subject.

I trained on Peer Review yesterday and both Andy and I did mini PR checks on some clients files. Usually we whiz thorough a sample of files spotting the SQM or CCA issues with the speed and trained eyes you would expect of people of our age and experience

This however is a very different way of looking at files and even though neither of us are qualified to comment on most issues of substantive law you can make some interesting conclusions. Obviously being given the brief to "do your worst" helps even so it is also easy to understand how defensive people get when it is their files under scrutiny. Nonetheless becoming hypercritical of file management, recording and client care will become an essential new skill of the file reviewer.

Those who have frequented our training courses in recent years will have heard me speak on the subject of making legal aid profitable and the tension faced by craft lawyers forced to become came managers. Yesterdays firm have been working to a similar LSC derived motto - you can't provide a Rolls Royce service in a Ford Cortina scheme. Now it seems one at least has to try.

File Review is not coming it is here.

ONE

I am reminded, by a request made yesterday, that the side bar linking to firm's web-sites is sorely under used (only 4 to date of around 30 daily visitors). If you want a connection to your firm's site simply e-mail the url and we will put up a link. No exams, no censorship and no brown paper bag transactions required.

TWO

If you have views on a subject please feel free to use the comments boxes, anonymously if you prefer, (again people will often ring me or e-mail direct rather than use the functions available on the site). Alternatively if you have a more substantial view on a subject send it and we will almost certainly put it up as a guest post.

N.B. We are particularly keen to collate views on Carter at this time.

Todays hearing went ok I think. If we lose the two main issues we certainly have scope to consider PoPs. The Commissions tenacity with reagrd to these final hearings still suprises me. It is as though the money "saved" was going into their own back pockets.

Twice today they sought to introduce new "de novo" points from only the most cursory passing glance at the file. This despite a fairly agressive direction from the Regional Panel of Chairmen stating that new issues of law or fact cannot be introduced on the day - a roadblock I've come up against elsewhere.

In addittion to that more Carter related misery on the phones - remember now is not the time to panic but to prepare.

Do you remember this CCA issue? The CC Chairman directed that we have the records translated into English and we duly did. Today the LSC have accepted these and further reduced the audit rating which is now tantalisingly close to a Category 1. A further hearing will be needed however.

A mixed bag of activities awaits me this week. Tomorrow an almost obligatory trip to "that" London is in store. This is in advance of a CC hearing on Wednesday, yet again this is one that I really do not think should be going ahead but they are not for budging! Thursday has me training, in-house, on Peer Review to a far sighted North East practice. Friday should be final preparation for these dates.

Have you booked up yet?

If not give Sandra a ring.

That story we've been trailing for a while should show up sometime this week stay tuned.

It is now official. (Well at least there's a report in What Car?).

What we have been pointing out for years is true, fat cat lawyers earn less than car mechanics. With scary coincidence the standard out-of-London preparation rate, for mainstream CDS work, is exactly the same as the lower range of garage charges identified in the report.

I for one am disgusted that there is so little media attention given to these fat cat grease monkeys who are clearly bleeding the hard working families of the UK dry. I am so incensed I am going to contact my MP and suggest that this be subject to serious Parliamentary consideration.

My proposal will be that a Labour Peer, with no connection to the motor trade, be given 6 months of blue sky thinking time to sort it out. In particular I am sure greater efficiency, and reduced costs to the public could be achieved by detailed consideration of the following areas of financial haemorrhage;

Sucking through teeth before telling a female driver that she will require "new trumpets" fitting.
Lascivious ogling of low quality, soft porn calendars sent by spark plug manufactures.
Ridiculous and outdated line dance routines undertaken by all workshop staff prior to changing a tyre.
The deliberate changing of all seat, radio, mirror and heating settings so as to make the vehicle undrivable on return.
Cars never being ready when promised (wrong part sent from Basildon boss)

Further suggestions of other industries worthy of similar scrutiny gratefully received.

One of my tasks in London was a chat with a Solicitor facing a High Cost PACE visit from the LSC in the near future. He seems to me to have very strong arguments, high percentage of Duty work and some truly exceptional claims which skew the average. The LSC don't even seem to have considered this point despite sending a print out of the files they wish to inspect containing four £1,000 plus claims.

The outcome of the Carter situation might make this a thing of the past however until then it seems to persist. Our CDS 6 Wizard remains both an essential tool in understanding the nature of your own PACE claiming and Free. Get in touch if you want one.

At the end of this post we indicated that we would be offering, in the long tradition of JRS, a briefing about the current proposals. We have now finalised dates which are as follows:

Monday 27 Feb.
Marriot Hotel, Gateshead

Monday 6 Mar.
Jurys Inn, Manchester

All sessions start at a Criminal Practitioner friendly 4 pm, and run till 6 pm attracting 2 CPD points. Booking forms will be sent by e and snail mail very shortly. In the meantime you can reserve places by contacting Sandra in the Middlesbrough Office.

We can also deliver the course in house or to "consortia" of local firms outside these 4 regions. If this is of interest get in touch.

P.S. I payed at Valley Parade for Swain House U13s in the 1975 City Supporters Cup running out 3 - 2 winners over Great Horton after extra time.

Update

If you can't make our dates friend of this site Rodney Warren is also on the briefing trail.

You can catch him as follows:

Cardiff, 15th March
Birmingham, 20th March
Chester, 21st March
Leeds, 22nd March
London, 28th March

Go on treat yourself come to both!!

I ran out of time to post on Monday (and the story I teed up last week has yet to get final approval for publication) as my windscreen wipers packed up and I had a rush to get to Teesside International Airport (Durham Tees Valley in 21st Century language). Then with 6 hours of shouting at people yesterday (training to you) another blog day passed by.

In any event the real excitement of my journey south was the A list celebs travelling with me. At Heathrow I bumped into Ming "the merciless" Campbell at the bagrec carrousel and on the way back I followed Teesside's X Factor finalists Journey South down the steps and through customs.

Oh the star studded life of a jet legal services consultant.

To me the key paradox remains; Carter's proposals are described as market-based reforms and yet we already have a functioning market. There are some problems with it here and there and perhaps some (minor) areas where savings could be made.

It is also, unless anyone can contradict me, the most regulated professional market in the UK. Despite this you can earn, by significant multiplication factors, far more on private client work without, SQM, GCC, Peer Review, additional accreditation, punitive cost audits, Preferred Supplier and regular night shifts.

Yet many continue to be in the CDS.

There are far too many criticisms to level at the proposals here so I'll limit it for now. The plans are predicated on the notion of "economy of scale" and that "big is beautiful". I would not say that this is never so however our experience tells us that on occasion it is. By contrast it seems pretty clear to me that the experienced criminal sole practitioner is often a pretty economic unit providing good value for money.

Tell me if I'm wrong.

The Carter Review Report has been published. Under the headline "Market-based reforms to make criminal legal aid more efficient" it proposes:

"Fixed pricing for all criminal legal aid work, including that provided in police stations, magistrates' courts and Crown Courts;

a managed market, awarding contracts to efficient and good quality suppliers that can take on more cases, either individual firms or collection of firms formed to deliver the benefits of scale;

managed price competition between efficient, good quality suppliers with safeguards to protect standards of quality, coverage in rural areas and diversity."

The full Press Release is here.

It is to be phased in over the next three to four years alongside the Preferred Supplier Project.

I am reading it now - updates later.

Update 1

Carter has been on the Five Live lunchtime news and our phones have gone nuts. Post thoughts or questions in the comments box and we will respond.

Update 2

The Carter team refer to the proposals as a "significant" change. On first impressions (a single read) that is a significant understatement. This goes further in scale than the previous LSC proposals for the London PCT pilot and most importantly they perceive a national roll out of a fully operational scheme by September 2009. Ultimately it will involve price competition not only for CDS work but also for Crown with fixed or graduated fees in all.

Initial tendering might be as soon as January next year (it will be a staggered process) but preparatory work towards the "quality" threshold will begin this year. The Preferred Supplier Scheme is set for a summer launch and related Peer Review will be completed by March 2007.

The scheme has three phases:

Phase 1
Preferred Supplier, prices fixed, PACE contracts tendered on a "quality" and "capacity" basis.

Phase 2
Re-tendering to reward efficient suppliers

Phase 3
Price competition for all criminal defence work.

Within this there is much more detail and plenty of food for thought (which I will be doing in the next few days). We will put together some briefing sessions in the next few weeks - these will be available for in-house delivery from the week beginning 19th February - and have a preconceived Peer Review tour planned for March.

In the meantime use the comments boxes on this thread for any questions etc.

My initial conclusion however is that this is dynamite.

Update 3

The LAPG's initial resonse is encouraging - contesting many of the claims and quite rightly calling the timescale "wholly unrealistic". Click on the "continue reading" link below to read the entire article.

The CLSA (and others) take an even dimmer view.

Comments on Carter report by Richard Miller, Director of the Legal Aid
Practitioners Group

General comments

It must never be forgotten that criminal defence lawyers perform a vital
constitutional function protecting the citizens of our democratic
society. They are not merely service providers in a market. Moreover,
legal cases are not widgets. The work cannot be treated as a standard
product without risking damaging the extent to which the rights of
ordinary citizens facing criminal charges are protected.

We welcome Lord Carter's repeated recognition that the inefficiencies of
others in the system have a detrimental effect on the legal aid budget.
We fear however that the proposals do not include adequate mechanisms
for dealing with those inefficiencies, and that as a result, the quality
of service to clients would inevitably suffer.

What defence solicitors do is also determined to a very large extent by
the actions and resources of police and prosecutors, as well as by new
laws passed by the Government. Their work cannot therefore be
constrained within fixed price systems when the rest of the criminal
justice system is so fluid. Pure market solutions cannot provide the
whole answer.

It is noteworthy that while the costs of the criminal justice system
have increased by 46% since 1998-9 (paragraph 8), the costs of the
criminal legal aid budget have increased by only 37% since 1997
(paragraph 10). This refutes the claim that a change in the structure is
needed to increase the efficiency of defence lawyers. An increasing
criminal defence budget is an inevitable consequence of better resourced
police, prosecutors and Courts. A Ministry of Justice would provide
joined-up Government that was better able to manage this balance.

We have suggested on numerous occasions in the past the restructuring of
duty solicitor rotas in London. We would also be willing to discuss how
a graduated fee scheme in the Crown Court might operate. And we can see
a possible place for minimum contract volumes. But to a significant
extent, this report repeats many of the proposals in the LSC's
competitive tendering paper from a year ago. We demonstrated in our
response to that paper, with the benefit of independent legal advice
from a City firm, that many of these measures are not just undesirable
but unworkable in the real world. It is disappointing that this report
has not addressed the problems we identified.

Specific comments:

A contract that lasts for only one to two years will lead to an undue
cost to the taxpayer as there will be administrative costs from frequent
bidding rounds, and the prices bid will be higher as suppliers have to
factor in their own costs of bidding so frequently. In no other field of
public procurement are such short contracts offered. For example, local
authority contracts for rubbish collection are for a minimum of seven
years.

There are repeated allegations that the current structure provides
incentives to lawyers to do more than the minimum amount of work
necessary. We reject that claim. The combination of standard fees for
much of the work, and audits that may result in the loss of a contract
for claiming excessive work, means that there is no such incentive.

The LSC expects its roll-out of the preferred supplier scheme to take a
significant period of time. It will not be in place in time to support
the timetable proposed in this paper. Moreover, firms will not be in a
position to absorb and respond to these proposed changes in anything
like the two to three years proposed. The timescale is wholly
unrealistic.

The report proposes at page 8 that the system must incentivise earlier
preparation work. As the Woolf reforms in the civil system demonstrated,
the effect of doing this is likely to be to increase the costs of each
individual case and of the legal aid budget overall.

LAPG is an independent membership organisation representing lawyers
working in the legal aid system, with over 600 member firms, the
majority of whom undertake criminal defence work.

We had an interesting and important post lined up for today but we have to delay it at least 24 hours.

Don't miss it tomorrow.

A curious, though thoroughly satisfactory decision, on a CCA appeal reaches us today. Initially our written representations achieved a reduction to a Category 2 outcome from a Cat. 3 starting point. An agenda document containing only part of our representations followed which we subsequently challenged. These further representations concentrated upon the LSC seemingly substituting their procedural directions for those of the CC itself.

Today notification of the cessation of the appeal and the granting of Cat 1 status arrive. Yet again I'm left wondering why this still has to be quite so hard.

I have just had a phone conversation with a colleague who has also been involved in the circus which is Contract Compliance Appeals. Like me he is currently searching for the Holy Grail of this activity, a certified Point of Principle on general findings and extrapolation.

With a mounting sense of deja vu on my part, he describes how his last two attempts have resulted in one committee determining there is absolutely no jurisdiction here and hence refuse to certify. The second committee also refused to certify the point this time because existing guidance is clear and such discretion certainly exists.

Those who have known me for some time (well from November 2003 at least) are aware that I have an Action Man style plastic neck. This has worked well for most of the last two years but occasionally gets a bit achy. Today is one of those days so only this short apologia for the lack of a substantive post.

Off to the toy doctor on Monday so hopefully more then.

As ever the Gazette site is a day behind so if you want to see a picture of friend of this blog Rodney Warren you will have to tear open the plastic bag and go to page 3.

Here he and others comment, in their usual diplomatic manner, upon the PDS Annual Report. This he describes as having "an element of self-congratulation". I think that is one of those expertly crafted understatements that better conveys a point than the sweary diatribes some of us engage in. He says all that needs to be said and a line by line rebuttal would be a complete waste of time.

You can sense a but coming on here though can't you?

I cannot however resist having a scratch at one particularly irritating itch. Read this quote from the LSC's Gaynor Ogden.

"From a standing start four years ago we have built up a successful business in which quality of service and client focus are key".

So the PDS is a business now and not a mixed market experiment? A competitor of, and not complementary to, the local suppliers. Ok, fair enough.

Which of us, started businesses with no personal risk, investing no financial or human capital. Our banks never guaranteed four years of guilt edged finance to get us over initial start up and through periods of poor trading. During the hard times we could not rely upon monthly salary cheques, we drew what was in the bank or was left of the over-draught.

I could go on for hours but enough - Rodney was correct quiet understatement is the best approach.

As Jim Royale would say "Business, my arse".

The Gazette lead with this story last week. Today news reaches us from a client in Manchester that the LSC have made a unilateral decision to cut the afternoon Duty Solicitor cover at Manchester Mags from 2 to 1. It is probably just coincidence that they follow in such short order. Or is it?

Is anything like this happening in your neck of the woods? If it is let us know and we will pass the info onto our friends in high places - well the LAPG and the CLSA at least!

We have been made aware of a free case law update service from the Institute of Prison Law. If you have not received this direct and are interested you can sign up here.