WHEN private practice solicitors started withdrawing from police station duty work at the end of last year their hope was to force the Scottish Government to start paying higher rates for publicly funded legal work.
Carnegie UK Trust chief executive Martyn Evans has put paid to that, though, by stressing that there is no justification for fee increases in his long-awaited report into how the legal aid system should be reformed.
Rather than paying lawyers more to do the same work, he said, the system should be overhauled to simplify the way legal assistance, as he termed it, is delivered, including by making greater use of technology.
READ MORE: Government review rejects pleas to raise legal aid fees
Inevitably, this could lead to individual lawyers earning even less from legal aid work, as layers of bureaucracy are stripped out to ensure the system is focused on the needs of end-users as opposed to service providers.
This will be cold comfort for the legions of lawyers who genuinely feel they are putting more into the system by way of long, often anti-social, hours than they are getting out in pay and recognition.
But Mr Evans is very clear: an oversupply of solicitors at a time when crime rates are falling is the reason legal aid incomes are shrinking, meaning the argument that fee levels should increase is misplaced.
Indeed, he even went as far as to question a 2017 Law Society of Scotland report designed to help lobby for fee increases, noting in particular that the methodology used was flawed.
“While this was an admirable attempt by the Law Society of Scotland to quantify the commercial viability of conducting legal aid work, and contribute to the debate on fees, the basis on which the report conclusions have been reached cannot be considered a strong evidential basis on which to conduct effective negotiations,” he said.
READ MORE: Government review rejects pleas to raise legal aid fees
Despite his tough stance on fees, Mr Evans’s report has been broadly welcomed by the legal profession, with most accepting that the current system is no longer fit for purpose.
Yet with his recommendations championing a system of legal assistance rather than one of legal aid, the feeling that that simply means a cheaper alternative to legal advice may prove hard to shake.
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