My Floyd tribute experience (ok but proving that progressive rock rightly became extinct) was truncated by a double fire alarm half way through the better second set. They had difficulty getting the largely middle age sober crowd out of the half full hall - if this happens when Weller visits there will be hell on - Middlesbrough Town Hall you have been warned.

I am not however going to post Floyd nor the star of last weeks "Later", Duffy - she is getting plenty enough air play. I shall be buying the forthcoming album with this as its title track first time I see it on sale:

Given the week I have had, appeal hearings, written representations on CCAs and the regular daily barrage of PACE standard fee enquiries I have once again been reflecting upon the slightly schizophrenic nature of our work.

Appeals are relatively easy - you try any reasonable argument you can muster and concede the undefendable. Advice is more troublesome and strains the radical interpretation employed in the above. We tend therefore, especially when surrounded by CCAs carrying significant, retrospective financial impact, to couch advice in protective, conservative terms.

Andy and I have just had a conversation about the likely future trouble spots for ongoing CCA which we are spotting from the chancy claims we are observing. One thing I would certainly do in these circumstances, if you are determined to chance your arm, is seek an early determination thus opening up the opportunity to appeal and even to begin developing the appropriate points of principle to guide future billing.

Did you ever suffer a recoupment as a result of a Crime Contract Compliance Audit? If so, we want to hear from you as we have just had a very interesting thought indeed.

Give us a ring, and by way of warning to worried/curious Autorecbots our Spambot filters are fully in operation.

Much has been made of the similarities between developing LSC procurement strategies and the NHS. Indeed the current Chief Executive, and I think the last, comes from a Health Service background. Contracting as we know it was of course known as Block Contracting for a time and concepts such as "fund holding" were frequently bandied around.

Consequently this story is of great interest. Would you like to earn 58% more for 7 hours less a week? Wouldn't we all!

Somehow I don't think this is quite what is on offer.

I shall taunt my GP buddy, who is dragging me out to keep him company at a Pink Floyd tribute show tonight, on your behalf. I think I will make him buy all the drinks.

On top of over 8 hours driving yesterday an earthquake in the middle of the night, alongside my cough and sore throat, was not what I really wanted. Never mind we seemed to get a good result at yesterdays last ever(?) Cost Committee. This reminded me how important the interaction between panel and applicant is and I do wonder if we could have achieved the same clarity on paper alone? An Independent Cost Adjudicator made similar comments to me last week and also opined that he missed the debate within the panel when arriving at decisions.

All that said on a personal (possibly selfish) level I still do not miss days like that any more. Lemsip, comfy chair, Radio on in the background and a couple of "shooting fish in barrels" appeals for me today - much better.

P.S. This is our 900th entry - who'd have thought it.

Had another hectic morning largely preparing for what I anticipate to be the very last Cost Committee ever. As you have probably surmised this involves very old claims which pre-date the move to Independent Cost Adjudicators. So previous celebrations, by me rather than suppliers I think, have proved premature. It is however far, far away (in distance not the setting of Shrek II) so I am going now and doing a bit of training on the way.

Will try a hotel room post tomorrow.

The only "World Music" artist I activly follow is Mariza the leading exponent of Portuguese Fado. The live "Concerto em Lisboa" CD featured in the link, sits with Alison Krauss and Union Station, Thin Lizzy and Led Zeppelin in the top 5 of the live album chart. (I have just noticed the Live DVD on sale on the site and fee a purchase coming on). There is a translation of the lyrics here.

Why does nobody make good live albums anymore?

It has definitely been Contract Compliance week. I have just come off the phone with a firm subject to the new civil version of this long discredited process, now re-badged as "Fixed Fee Contract Compliance Audit". Just as with the Crime version referred to below, this too involves pretty much the same as previous, this time "proof of means" providing the headline. I don't want to go into the detail of the potential appeal however civil providers should be aware that the LSC are rigidly, and wrongly in my view, applying the new post October '07 Rule 2.5. This removes the long-standing under 2-hour protection on which firms have traditionally relied when clients fail to provide proof. So be warned.

With regard to the bigger picture here is what the Constitutional Affairs Select Committee (at p. 87) had to say about CCA in July 2004

“Those who receive public money for providing a public service need to maintain proper professional standards. However, the current system of auditing solicitors costs is arbitrary, inaccurate and bureaucratic. Furthermore, it is not linked to quality of advice given. It is clearly punishing competent and honest solicitors and is operated in a way which completely fails to attract the support of the profession. This is the most serious criticism of the current system for managing legal aid work that we have found. A solution is urgently needed.” (emphasis added)

By way of an answer the Government, in its November response, indicated that CCAs would be “eliminated” for the “majority of civil suppliers” via the introduction of the Tailored Fixed Fee scheme and Peer Review.

Does anyone know if this constitutes "misleading Parliament"?

Illuminating the VHCC night like a halogen spotlight.

Lets hope he will shortly be able to say "It was just a storm in a teacup which has now passed over and now the tea cup is in the dishwasher".

Things were so hectic yesterday I did not get round to blogging - I was not even in transit to some distant law firm just hemmed in by appeals and telephone enquiries.

So with one CCA appeal finalised I moved onto Peer Review representations only for the second Crime CCA in two days to turns up. Guess what it is pretty much the same as this.

Watch out folks it appears to be on the way back with all the misery the previous war years brought.

I have my first appeal against the new style Crime Contract Compliance Audit in front of me and guess what:

Unrepresentative sample

Comprehensive misunderstanding of Contract and CBAM

Insufficient and unreferenced justification for decisions

Demands for money with menaces

Exactly right back to where we were nearly 5 years ago. "Applied Muppetry" does not get the half of it. This is a dirty little pre-PACE standard fee cash grabbing exercise.

Whilst we are on the subject of costs adjudications we did some interesting Freedom of Information delving before last Christmas.

Most appeals, like the one referred to in the link above (post below) are now undertaken in the Region in which the "business delivery centre" is based. You may have a view as to whether this is right or wrong, I tend towards wrong but understand the possible practical ramifications of the alternative. What does worry me is that this is already eroding local panels and if, like in Birmingham, virtually no appeals are being processed in that RO, this will only get worse.

The lack of a national policy was exemplified by recent discussions in Birmingham, indeed the Regional Director was unaware of the lack of adjudications going to the local panel. (There has subsequently been some detailed correspondence on the subject and more cases will be off to the Bullring!)

Most disturbingly however are the individual area office stats.

Now in Nottingham, which by some margin deals with the largest volume of appeals, even a casual glance suggests a fairly even distribution of available work across quite a sizeable panel. A more detailed number crunch confirms this. So if your appeal is processed in Notts you get a roughly random chance as to who your ICA will be.

Compare that to to Liverpool and you see a different picture. Here 4 of the 14 civil panel members dealt with 58% of the appeals (one doing 22% of these alone) and 5 of 15 did 62% of the crime. Not quite as even a spread. This, however, is nothing. In Newcastle two thirds of appeals went to 2 of the 11 members utilised and in Manchester one adjudicator alone handled nearly half of civil cases (I did wonder if this was a typo). Once allowances have been made for the difficulty of ensuring equal distribution, availability etc., there clearly has to be something not quite right here.

I do of course have my suspicions as to what that is, based in part on personal experience.

The LSC might well want to take steps to ensure that fairness is being seen to be done.

Now decisions of Cost Committees - sorry Independent Adjudicators - do not set precedents. At the height of the CCA wars however, when we were doing multiple hearings every week, and when the Committee Clerk was a suitably senior, experienced and trained member of staff they nearly did. I remember one case, a successful Category 1 outcome one paper submissions which the firms was insistent went to Committee to establish the travel time reasonably involved in a journey regularly faced by local firms. The CC agreed with the firms general timings and the Clerk indicated that he would let the assessors know so that they did not make the same error time and time again. As you know things quickly became worse and the application of such common sense rapidly disappeared.

That said we advised upon an potential appeal recently involving the firm claiming for time involved in collecting and processing urgent Court Orders required in a domestic violence case. Perversely of course the time claimed by the fee earner was less than would have been involved had they instructed a process server.

The adjudicator agreed with us - hopefully a memo will be winging its way around the assessment centre.

We have generated something of a new LSC vocabulary on this blog as amply demonstrated by the post below and the oft used, and allied title, "autorecbot". These have developed from our, and our clients, daily experience of the ever-changing world of Legal Aid.

The two current favourites are "makeitupaswegoalongery" and "applied muppetry". Examples of both are an almost daily occurrence.

Today's first example of the latter involves the LSC telling the most volatile solicitor in Halifax that he is actually in Leeds. Now he, and I, are both pretty damn sure that he is still in Halifax. As a consequence of which he does not need to claim the Leeds "designated urban area" standard fee - the boundaries for which are defined in contract as involving the Local Authority boundary. To repeat Halifax, as the Commission now agree, is not in Leeds. To avoid any further cock ups neither is it in Nova Scotia.

(To be completely fair the lady involved in this story, from the LSC, made an innocent mistake based upon incorrect data supplied to her and her colleagues. She, and her counterpart in Leeds, have not only sorted this out in record time, but been genuinely apologetic for the, not their, mistake).

I did a story about Transformers on Tuesday last and the Gazette picks it up and runs it on Thursday.

The phrase "cut to the chase" is perhaps a little inappropriate in the circumstances however there looks like some serious downsizing on the cards with, no doubt, a reduction in the quality of service. I notice that former colleague Linda Summers is one of the recent departures and share Roy Morgan's concern:

"They are among the last people at the LSC with a legal aid background and the loss of their experience must raise questions of how the LSC is planning to restructure."

The title of this post comes from the Transformers movie website.

Have just wasted 30 mins trying to get tickets to see Mr W (don't like that 'Modfather' stuff) at Middlesbrough Town Hall in May - I hope for better luck later here however is some of what we hope to see:

We do an acoustic version

As we explained here the decision to allow travel disbursements to be claimed over and above the Crown Court Litigators Fee lead to some last minute changes to the rates tables. These are both different in number and also format to those used on our recent training event and are published in the final Funding Code to which we reference in the above link. You can either go back to the original story and get the new tables there or alternatively you can contact the office for our version. As you will see it is colour co-ordinated to link in with those used in the training course too!

We can also supply amended pages of the course notes to you request.

CDS suppliers will want to have a look at this next bout of "makeitupaswegoalongery". I have only had a brief glance and there are at least a couple of interesting developments, post charge claims at old rates for instance.

The main area of concern is still the "when is more than one fee claimable" question. This remains the only area where adverse retrospective assessment might prove problematic - other claims being triggered by the actual costs claimed sections of the CDS 6 - so it's important to get this right straight away, or to challenge these interpretations early.

Three days left this week that means three in-house courses to deliver (all different) and both a Peer Review and a CCA appeal to tidy up. Who said February was quiet.

Before watching The Bourne (whatever the last one is called) on Sky last night there was an advert for "Transformers" which is now on Box Office too. Now regulars will know that we have had a a bit of fun here with names such as "Autorecbots" and of course the "Robots in Disguise" themselves.

I predict a return of these wondrous contraptions to our skies in the near future with LSC Transformation once again becoming the issue of the day.

The Mills/McCartney case has brought the issue of litigants in person into the news - that case continues as the papers say. This is an interesting article on the subject, which goes beyond the current circus at the RCJ. Unsurprisingly the issue of Legal Aid entitlement comes into the story:

"Legal aid covered most of the population when it was introduced around 1950, but successive lord chancellors have failed over the past 20 years to bring the income limits in line with inflation. In 2008, hardly anyone with a full-time job qualifies".

Whilst one could be cynical, wrongly in my view, about barristers claiming that they get better results than LiPs, it seems plain that the knock on costs to the wider legal system are not being measured.

Would anybody like to hazard a guess as to the target date for the reintroduction of Online billing?

And while you are at it what do you think a "post-Best Value Tendering world" would look like?

P.S. just heard that our last bash at BVT was successful - hoorah!

I got excited for a moment because of the LF1 and LF2 entries at the end of this list of forms. Could they be the new hard copies of the Litigators Fee claim forms? You would think so wouldn't you?

If you click on the link to the forms page - they ain't there.

Maybe later.

UPDATE

Here they are

LF1

LF2

Portishead are back together, touring and releasing a new album in April - here is one of their greats:

I have this channel on in the background in the office and have just heard two gems.

First in true "Speak Your Brains" style there was this from a caller regarding the Archbishop's contribution on Sharia Law:

"I bet Jesus Christ will be turning in his grave"

This was followed by a piece on "team building away days". One contributor offers experiential learning with horses which is "directly relevant to the workplace" for £8,000 a day. We are now able to offer a similar product, however involving my two dogs, at half that price, (plus our hounds get loads of extra exercise).

Sandra is taking orders.

Still no CCLF forms. Still saying nothing.

Between billing enquiries I have predominantly had my nose stuck inside various Contract Compliance Audits (CCA). This occasioned me to revisit the Parliamentary scrutiny of this process which lead me to this:

In July 2004 The Constitutional Affairs Select Committee (at p. 87) concluded as follows with regard to the practice of Contract Compliance Audits (CCA):

“Those who receive public money for providing a public service need to maintain proper professional standards. However, the current system of auditing solicitors costs is arbitrary, inaccurate and bureaucratic. Furthermore, it is not linked to quality of advice given. It is clearly punishing competent and honest solicitors and is operated in a way which completely fails to attract the support of the profession. This is the most serious criticism of the current system for managing legal aid work that we have found. A solution is urgently needed.” (emphasis added)

Not only has a solution not been found it is being resurrected in Crime and replicated in slightly different form in FAVFM. Why have Immigration suppliers, well at least those in private practice, continued to be subjected to this process unamended?

As I try and unpick some of the damage these audits have caused I think it is time we had an honest answer.

I think I have just chanced upon a way to "share" a couple of my brother an my recordings. You should be able to download and play them by linking here. You will have to join "multiply" though but - takes a couple of mins. Don't shout if it's not worth it.

Our album "Start" is still available for a donation to Lawcare.

Let me know what you think - I'm vain that way you see.

Apparently we might get the CCLF forms today.

Thanks for the nod Nigel.

We have had a work halting hiatus this morning as it dawned on us, thanks to a eagle eyed client tip off, that the actual Crown Court Litigators Fees now differ from the most recently published tables (October '07). These are the tables we utilised in all recent CCLF training and with which delegates will be well familiar. This is a result of the decision to allow travel disbursements to be claimed in addition to the LF. They are consequently lower than the Oct 07 version however the LSC have not, as far as we can tell, made this clear or published the new tables.

After some searching we have discovered that the new rates can either be accessed direct, from the Funding Order or are visible in the other "tabs" on the Litigators Fee Calculator. Todays madness occurred when it became clear that all of the worked examples in our training course are now paid at a lower rate due to these changes. The Funding Order tables for "overweight" cases are actually easier to use.

We will provide a link or a download opportunity to a more user friendly set of tables as soon as one becomes available. For further clarification give me a ring.

The LSC calculator does however appear to work.

UPDATE

I have updated the Course notes and will happily supply the 3 changed pages. Having done this it is important to stress that the tables in the Funding Order are ex VAT unlike the tables used in the course.

There are some other subtle differences which I would also be happy to explain.

FURTHER UPDATE

The LSC do not intend to reproduce the background numbers for CCLF in the previous format. That means you have either to utilise the tables from the Funding Order above or the other pages of the Calculator workbook. We will have to reproduce them in some format for future LF training courses and will make these available when we have done so.

130 VHCC Panel Advocates - 130!

Out of nearly 3,000.

130!

Unbelievable.

The solution (after all the time and effort of preparing those bids):

Choose who you want.

How many empty cells are there in British jails?

I tried to get to this guidance on the new Public Law scheme on the LSC website when it first appeared. I ended up with a screen displaying an error message. Well it is accessible now and contains a better than previous guidance on how the £2,500 assessment limit impacts upon graduated fees.

Steve has now got through to "Offline" marketing re CCLF Online billing, they say this:

"We are staggering the input of these requests and you will get e-mail confirmation of access within the next 2 weeks"

Compare that to this:

"The online claims system for the Litigator Graduated Fee Scheme (LGFS) will be up and running on Monday (4 Feb 08)."

Staggering.

UPDATE

As Tracy indicates, in the comments on the thread below, hard copies are currently not available either. Nigel nearly spoke to the responsible person at the LSC (who was unavailable "in training") but other than that had the same - "sometime in the next fortnight" - experience as Steve. We will let you know when paper forms are available.

I did not comment on the bold assertion that Online CCLF billing would be possible from today.

Our first try has lead to an instruction that firms need to "request" that this facility be switched on and that this will will be done on a first cone first served basis. You might therefore want to give it a whirl.

we have not been able to get our mits on the hard copy of the forms though have had a merry dance through their web site.

That is all I know.

There has been a recent series of modern zombie movies, of the "I am Legend" and "28 Days/Weeks Later" variety. In these, sub-human monsters occupy the post apocalyptic world thriving on the chaos and attacking the uninfected survivors. More intelligent critics than I see this as a metaphor for modern life.

Now I know it is stretching the point to apply the same consideration to the post-"online billing" world but bear with me.

We are in a contract management situation where all rules have been abandoned. To date we have had two ad hoc methods of providing sound data on which monthly payments will be calculated - the former clearly outwith contractual provisions.

In this post apocalyptic reporting world "autorecbots" roam the empty streets a law unto themselves, randomly slashing at SMPs with seemingly no rhyme or reason - save one. The batch Andy has in front of him today all have a common feature - an attempt to reconcile to 100% by end of March 2008 and not the 107.5% provided for by the Criminal Defence Service General Criminal Contract Monthly Payment Rules 2002.

Time to get your cricket bats out!

Again chasing to get onto the road however managed to sneak this in.

I was listening to the Magazine cover last night (whilst reading the consultations linked to below) having heard the song used as the out-track on Shrek the Third ("sung" by Eddie Murphy and Antonio Banderas). So here is the original:

More consultation, this time on the July CDS Unified Contract. It is proposed that this will be for 12 months this time. Of most interest will probably be the proposed Duty Solicitor Arrangements and Slot Allocation. At a quick glance last night there appear to be two options one pretty much as now or, secondly, following a bidding procedure. Both are based on numbers of employed Duty Solicitors at start of contract and not claims history. The former will involve regular 3 or 6 monthly reissue of rotas the latter will last for the lifetime of the contract.

Annex G in this document includes the proposed KPIs (key performance indicators keep up at the back!) which as predicted include a 10% average CDS 7 and exceptional PACE claim reduction rate and some Duty Solicitor acceptance rates. There is also a drag over of substantive benefit outcome codes from the civil scheme but incorporating three of the indicators from the old Quality Profile Report.

All Civil reporting must be made electronically by March although this will probably still be via bulkload spreadsheets, and not because "Offline" has become "Online".

If you want out CMRF Wizard which can achieve this just give the office a ring.

The online claims system for the Litigator Graduated Fee Scheme (LGFS) will be up and running on Monday (4 Feb 08).