Firstly, welcome to Nearly Legal. Secondly, I don’t think any of us on the supplier side blames the poor front line LSC staff. I have tried, throughout my frequent rants here, to distinguish between piss poor management and policy and the poor sods who have to deliver the results. Having said that, I’m sure there have been odd occasions on the phone when the frustration is just too much. For that, I apologise – to the recipient, but not for the content.

Nothing of what you say surprises me, although the revelation that you are regularly told to lie to suppliers is a bit of a shocker. Any, suitably anonymised/compounded examples of when, how and why?

I suspect that LSC people would be surprised how many of us would actually be very interested in helping to work out an effective, efficient and cheaper system. We don’t want to be forced into an antagonistic position either. But there we are, and the loss of trust is pretty close to irreparable, if not already past that point.

For the meantime, believe me, you do have my sympathy.

I realise it doesn’t comapre to the plight of many members of your profession, but please spare a though for us powerless LSC employees. We are told to lie to suppliers regularly, and when this is greeted with understandable anger we are given no support from our management or the policy makers. Maybe if we could even contact them that would help, but they change their roles and department titles so often it’s usually hard to track them down. Many of us are thoroughly ashamed of how the organisation has conducted itself recently, and if we were allowed voices of our own we would be fully supporting the Law Society’s JR and encouraging the barristers not to sign anything.