First days back, even from a long weekend break are always a pain. I have a job I desperately want to sort today, however this morning I couldn't take my car for a service as I was unable to find part of my driving license (for courtesy car purposes). A wasted hour later that had to be cancelled and put back to later in November.

In the office there are a number of small but urgent jobs to do, so my main task for the day, the tidying of a CCA appeal will now go over into into tomorrow.

Positively, we have a PR result in showing "threshold competent" (that 's 4 such categorisations in a row for CDS firms) which will be at least a bit of a relief and they now have plenty of time to get their score a grade higher.

Finally, does anyone have any experience of the subsidised training-grant scheme? If you do, would you give me a ring.

By the way Barca was as fantastic as anticipated with temperatures around 24c all weekend.

To make up for no post on Monday too here is another one today.

Sandra and Joanna are taking advanced orders for Start, the debut album of slow time mondays. £5 a time of which £4 goes to charidy - about which I do not like to talk.

Album launch and a live performance at the Rudds Arms, Marton, Middlesbrough a week today.

Not here tomorrow as I am going here with my mates.

It is a city I love and I will happily revisit all those tourist places I been to before, but others haven't, especially here, here and probably this gem too .

It was images from the diving at the 1992 Olympics which first attracted me to the place - had I a transferable skill I might even move there.

I do intend finally to get to this park which has always eluded us in the past.

Needless to say it will also involve plenty of this, this, and this.

For those of you stuck in cold blighty may I suggest trying out some of these and a little drop of this.

Back Tuesday.

If you've missed it, here is a recent letter sent to CDS suppliers. It is not that this is demonstrative of the complete administrative balls up that means testing has been, which makes me so annoyed. Neither is it the "make it up as we go along" approach which has wound me up. It is the fact that after just making a large number cost code laminates incorporating the new 2T code along comes 2U. Or is it just part of their famous catchphrase?

Back to the laminator for Joanna then.

During the conversation outlined here it became clear that my missus did not get how to use blog comments boxes. This set me thinking that others might be in the same situation, rather than just being shy.

It is a simple process. Just click on the blue "comments" link and a new screen pops up. Type in your name and e-mail address in the fields provided and then type your comment into the large box at the bottom. (You can cut and paste from word processing software if you want to spell check etc.) You can then either "preview" the comment or "post" it direct.

If you want to remain anonymous simply choose a pseudonym (most blog commentators do this) and put in a false e-mail address e.g. a@b.com - this is better than simply "anon" if conversations do break out.

Andy and I had what might loosely be called a "partnership meeting" on Monday night and we talked about this place a bit.

The reason for this is that traffic to the site has grown exponentially in the last few months, each setting a consecutive new record for the number of monthly visits. This month might see us go above 1,000 users. Far from making us complacent we feel this is a resource we can further develop and I am going to meet the design and technical people in the near future to this end (they independently think it needs a visual make over).

Beyond that this post seeks you, the visitors, thoughts. To get things going here are some of my own.

We need more conversations going in the comments boxes (hence the post above this one). Writers other than me and more guest contributions - not just pinching LAPG press releases when they drop on the mat - might help. As far as we can tell people like the lighter off topic stuff too so perhaps more of that.

Any ideas of you own grateful received.

I am off to do the Cost Committee hearing on the first of these appeals, (the one involving two officers).

I am hoping that it will be another 3 minute hearing. The firm only claimed enhancement for trial preparation and advocacy, which went to two days. It involved a detailed "no case to answer" submission at half time, consideration of complicated evidence and chronology, plus the use of detailed expert reports. I think it justifies enhancement over the entire claim however the LSC say none at all.

What do you think?

If the letters QPR put you in mind of his favourite football team you can be excused. If this is the case have a quick look here.

You might however, like me, find this a little short on interpretative detail. This more so if you have a couple of asterisks against the numbers in the middle column of your firm's profile. Want to know how to avoid this in the Family category? Give us a ring.

If you are yet to see a QPR you should request one from your Account Manager along with a CMRC (Contract Management Review Criteria). Fax them through to Middlesbrough and we will ring you back with an explanation as to what these somewhat impenetrable documents mean.

Given this story today might not be the best time to speak to me, so direct you calls to Andy!

Yes its that time of year again Halloween and Bonfire night with your Christmas Party to book (if it's not too late).

All this means it will shortly be time to fill in your FR 1.

Has to be in by December 10th.

I am shouting a long way from home tomorrow so the chances of a post are negligible. Given that we have done a lot about photos recently I feel compelled to draw you attention to this must read piece in Obiter.

The photo it displays can be found here .

And the headline is right it does put one in mind of simpler times.

You probably know by now that as well as shouting (training) under our own brand we do some collaborative work with TMT Professional Training. I am writing the update PR course as we speak.

Chanced upon this alternative explanation of their name earlier today. New course title:

"TMT applied to Peer Review"

The Gazette joins in the climb down over civil fixed fees theme we have been pushing all week.

The bit I like is;

"Speaking to reporters after addressing delegates, Lord Falconer conceded that the government has ‘realised there are significant problems’ with fixed fees and that the figures put out by the Legal Services Commission ‘did not work’."

The e-Gazette does not reproduce the front page photo so here he is in panto last year.

Yesterdays "good news" story has inspired a flurry of contacts both by phone and e-mail, plus the comments on the actual story. The responses range from "phew" to "what about Crime?". Most though seem to hope that this might represent some sort of tipping point justifying wider relief.

At the same time Sandra has been doing some work on recent training feedback forms. Rather than being vain and printing testimonials here are two suggested future courses which I might now slow down preparing:

"How to make a successful bid - once consultation ends & the lunacy comes to pass!

"Running a Profitable Chip Shop"

Did you read this in the Times on Saturday like I did?

"Lord Falconer of Thoroton announced that he was in effect scrapping controversial plans for fixed fees instead of hourly rates in family and civil legal aid cases pending a complete rethink. He also pledged to reconsider the timetable for the scheme, which had been due to start in April. It is likely that the proposed market-based reforms will not now come in before 2008."

Read the entire article here .

Delegates at recent courses will know that I have generally been more upbeat about the likely outcome of this process than most of them. Here is some confirmation of this stance, hopefully with more to come.

UPDATE

At the point of posting this story this I get a very spooky call asking me if I have seen the same story. In addition to that comes some interesting news from a live audit and the LSC's in-house view of the Preferred Supplier Scheme and social welfare categories. (Ring me if you want an insight). Unsurprisingly the audit team had not had the gist of the Times story explained to them - oh how well Steve and I remember that situation.

A couple of our CDS clients are piloting a Peer Review case planning form. Try it for yourself.

If you want a Word version so that you can amend it ring Joanna or Sandra on the number on the side bar.

In the last two weeks I have written/prepared two appeals to Cost Committee on reduced CDS 7 claims. Both coincidentally involve clients ultimately acquitted of assault charges against police officers. The officers in both matters (two in one, 6 in the other) are effectively caught out lying. The first attendance note on the latter remarks how difficult the case will be given the need to discredit at least half a dozen serving officers.

In the light of all the Carter comment here this week one does wonder how such cases are likely to be defended in a post Carter world. By defence lawyers effectively working for free I expect.

Barnesy's response to this is to say that I am a lookie-likie of him. Can't see it myself.

We do of course have one of these on the team.

Look into my eyes....

In the post below the LAPG's Richard Miller makes the following observation:

"They (Legal Aid Solicitors) save the taxpayer many times more than they cost"

Is he psychic?.

Not cheap these miscarriages in justice are they?

More on Carter I'm sorry to say but the Legal Aid Practitioners Group has today published its response to the DCA/LSC consultation, “Legal Aid: A Sustainable Future.”

Director Richard Miller said,

"A sustainable future is the one thing these proposals have no hope of delivering. Practitioners from across the country and in all fields of law have told us that their firms will close if these changes are introduced. At our conference last Friday, we heard from practitioners who are already laying off staff in readiness for next April when these changes are due to take effect, and preparing to close their businesses. Clients will be struggling to find services from next April unless there is a major rethink."

Miller continued, "Legal aid solicitors act to stop children being wrongly taken into care, to ensure anyone accused of crime gets a fair trial, to help those fleeing torture to get protection, to make sure the elderly and vulnerable get the services and support they need. They save the taxpayer many times more than they cost, by helping people avoid or escape social exclusion and stop being a burden on the benefits system, the criminal justice system, the health system. And they help make us a more civilised society. For doing all this, they currently earn incomes equivalent to teachers and senior nurses, and now the Government wants to squeeze even more 'value for money' out of them."
 
"Well this stone is out of blood."

An abstract of LAPG response to Carter follows:

The budget

The size of the legal aid budget is a political choice, not an immovable fact of nature.
The pressure on the budget has been caused in large part by changes to the law, procedure and policy on the part of Government and other public bodies, and not by anything within the control of solicitors. Therefore solutions aimed at solicitors will create an unstable and unsustainable situation.
The Legal Aid Impact Test has been a good step in the right direction, but we need it to be applied retrospectively to the changes of the past ten years.

The market

The legal aid market is imperfect, so that market solutions may not work, or may have unforeseen adverse consequences on the supplier base. The Government is a monopoly purchaser. Those who leave the market will not be able to maintain their expertise until there is an opportunity to return. Consumers are not able to judge quality even after they have received services, and post-hoc measurements of quality may be ineffective. Most purchases by consumers are “one-off” rather than regular. Services are not homogenous and have not been sufficiently defined to attach a market price to them. Purchasing under the proposed system will be based on inaccurate and inefficient forecasting of what services will be needed, rather than responding to actual need as it arises.
Legal aid services currently survive in many firms due to cross-subsidy from other fields of work. Lord Carter acknowledges that this should not happen, and that any market should work on the basis of full recovery of the cost of doing the work. This will be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to police with the result that competition on price will not be fair in accordance with normal market rules.

Fixed fees

We object to fixed fees in principle for most types of work. They pay a single fee regardless of the work actually required on a case, where variations are too great to be handled within such a structure. They penalise experts in favour of those doing routine work. They will have an adverse impact on quality and client care.
If fixed fees are to be introduced, then the systems need to be much more sophisticated than those currently proposed. Refinements may include breaking down subject areas into ranges of case types; paying for different stages within civil cases rather than a single fixed fee; or having a number of special issue payments to ensure fair remuneration for cases with particular complicating factors.
Fixed fees are unacceptable without robust “polluter pays” mechanisms across all fields of law, so that solicitors are not unfairly penalised by the inefficiency of others.
The escape provision of four times the fixed fee leaves solicitors open to far too great a risk of substantial work going unpaid for the structure to be economically viable.
By demanding information on cases and reserving the right to take action under “value for money” provisions if solicitors do not do work up to the level of the fixed fees, the LSC is denying the binary logic of a fixed fee system and removing the bureaucratic savings that they themselves assert are an intrinsic part of making the system workable.

Timescale

The timescale proposed for the changes is too short. It does not allow sufficient time to devise the scheme in such a way that it has a reasonable prospect of working without severely damaging client services. The reforms require significant restructuring on the part of firms that cannot be achieved by next April. In most fields, there is no significant pressure on the budget and therefore no urgency to introduce changes.

Crime

The proposals for crime may possibly be made to work, subject to significant refinement and additional resources, in urban areas. In rural areas and market towns, different solutions are required. Those solutions have not been identified.
Fixed fees for police station work carry a risk of abuse by the police, as well as requiring solicitors to carry the burden of police inefficiency.
Rolling up travel and waiting into the standard fee scheme will penalise solicitors for inefficient court listing systems, failures by CPS to prepare properly, failures by prison delivery services to get defendants to Court on time, and for geographical issues beyond their control.
The Crown Court graduated fee proposals unduly penalise solicitors acting in “document-light” cases such as serious assaults in favour of those conducting “document-heavy” cases such as fraud.

Family

Care cases are inherently unsuited to a fixed or graduated fee system. The cases need services that are specifically tailored to the needs of the individual parents and children. The caseloads are too small to generate the necessary balance between gains and losses.
The fees proposed will penalise heavily the experts in this field, and in particular Children Panel members, in favour of those who have not shown such expertise and who conduct less-demanding cases.
The fees will penalise those acting for parents against those acting for children.
The payment of multiple fees where there is more than one child client introduces an irrational random element to the redistribution of fees. Conversely, it has the effect in a case where a solicitor is acting for four children that the solicitor could do £75,000 of work and only receive £20,000. A single such case could bankrupt a firm.
The structure for private law family work is unworkable. Ancillary relief and residence disputes are unsuited to a fixed fee system. Contact cases and domestic violence injunctions could be suited to such a scheme if the rates are right and the appropriate safeguards and escapes are included.
A system which pays the same single fee whether the case involves domestic violence, ancillary relief, children disputes or separate proceedings involving all three is inherently unworkable.
The rates currently offered under this structure are likely to cause a large proportion of the supplier base to abandon publicly funded private law family work.

Immigration

The proposals appear to be a return to the suggested caps on costs from a couple of years ago. The rates on offer are inadequate to enable firms to continue to provide a quality service.

Mental Health

The proposals are based on a misunderstanding as to the law and procedures in this field, and it is therefore very difficult to respond to them.

The proposed system is said to be “cost neutral”, but this is in the context of demanding that solicitors do more cases (because of the abolition of means testing) and more work on cases (hospital meetings) than at present. A proposal that requires solicitors to undertake more work to earn the same fees is not cost neutral. The money to fund these desirable extensions of service in this area must be found from outside the current legal aid budget.

General civil

The proposed regional and national fee schemes are both irrational. They take no account of need, of regional plans, or of the wish to encourage services into areas not presently served. There are local variations in advice needs and in the actions and policies of local authorities, benefits agencies etc that can result in significant variation between areas in the amount of work required on apparently identical cases.
Certain client groups have greater needs which are not addressed, so that the proposals are discriminatory against clients on the grounds of race and disability.
It will not be possible for firms to restructure in order to take on the full range of cases so as to make a system based on averages work. The cases a firm gets depend on whether there is a network of good advice agencies below them, how opponents behave, and the nature of the client group in their catchment area.
The averages are based on the work done by all firms, yet the LSC intends to exclude those providing an inadequate service.
We support the decision not to change the payment mechanism for civil certificated work at this time.

There is some positive coverage of Legal Aid here today.

You can also join in the debate - I have.

This is JRS Consultant Steve Barnes.

Have you ever seen him in the same room as him or him.

Gavin joins the means testing debate here.

Check the comments boxes on this blog and you will see that we have never been very good at achieving Mrs Merton's holy grail of a "heated debate".

One appears to be brewing here however. The other party to the dispute is a former Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year. Go on join in!

Makes a bit of a change to the usual stories we put up on here though.

I could not go to LAPG conference this year so thanks to Richard Miller for a copy of his speech.

Nothing to disagree with there and I love the stuff about comparative rates for other Government funded lawyers!

During the last training tour I got to cover practical preparation for the post Carter world. Reluctantly I have introduced a short "management speak" section, not least because of our agreement with the authors of this report.

One topic involves creating a career ladder for staff, cross referenced to the need to get Police Station advice in house. Although this is a criminal example the same is true in civil categories where we have witnessed the equally successful development of support staff into capable fee earners.

Today, for the first time, I am looking at the work of someone who I first met as a junior secretary eight or nine years ago. In the context of preparing for a Peer Review Training session it is some of the best recorded PACE work I have seen for a very long time. It is an example which will be used to fill out the course content from here on in.

UPDATE

On the same sample of files I see a letter, to the neighbour of a remanded client, concerning the welfare of his dog. Fantastic client care. And here is a picture of one of my dogs.

Who are the most long suffering touring band in music history? Guinness World Records don't have this category, at a guess its probably someone like Motorhead.

I have had a couple of days back in the office and now my next nation-wide training round looms. It is, surprise, surprise, the Peer Review course again.

The itinerary is as follows;

CARDIFF
8th November

NEWCASTLE
10th November

BIRMINGHAM
14th November

LONDON
16th November

MANCHESTER
21st November

LEEDS
22nd November

More importantly "slow time mondays", my musical collaboration with my kid brother, next perform live on 2nd November at the Rudds Arms, Marton, Middlesbrough. The long awaited debut album is released on this date, advanced purchases from Sandra at the office address!

As ever the Gazette web site is trailing in well behind the snail mail paper version. That means you have to rip the plastic bag to get to the headline story. not surprisingly this concerns the "shambolic" means test. This CLSA protocol is covered in some detail as are, Ian Kelcey, its Chairman's views. Have a read if not too busy chasing NI numbers.

We continue to receive evidence in support of the articles main contention.

UPDATE

Here is a belated link to the article and here is a depressing letter in the same publication.

Would you like an increase in Civil contract rates somewhere between 20-37% and the ability to reconcile you contract to 85%? Thought of becoming a Not for Profit Organisation (NfP)? Perhaps on Solicitor rates you already are!!

As promised now the eligibility calculator has been released here is a link to it.

Whilst on this topic there has been a good deal of discussion about a key concept in the means test, that of “equivalised income”. Try spell checking “equivalised” – no suggestions. Try a dictionary – not there. Google it however and you get this. For those who like graphs there are these.

Hope this clarifies things!

Yesterday saw the return of the means test for Criminal Legal Aid in the Magistrates Court.

I have never seen such unanimity amongst the profession as this (Contracting and Carter always had at least some minority support).

First there has been unanimous reporting feeling about the explanatory road-shows. Useless! This has been coupled with deep sympathy, amongst those I've spoken too, for the poor souls "tasked" with delivering these highly inconclusive sessions.

Next has been the "jotters" received yesterday. With one voice the "how much will this have cost?" question has been raised, as has a similar query about their practical value.

Beyond that, operational difficulties reach our ears in significant numbers; you can't apply here, take the papers to the office down the road, no - we will not grant an adjournment to sort out Legal Aid, we want them posted not handed in, and many more. That's without all the structural problems, N.I. numbers and partners signatures, and those peculiarities which always get missed in the first design of an an initiative - especially when seemingly so poorly (hurriedly?) prepared as this one.

Any further contributions to this tale of woe can be added in the comments below.