Tag Archive for 'criminal'

LSC to grade advocates?

Published
by
NL
on 21 June 2008
in Legal Aid
. 3 Comments

By an unexpected route, the following landed in my inbox. I haven’t heard anything about this, nor had some friends in Criminal so this may be news. What is clear is that the Legal Services Commission are seeking to introduce competence assessments for Criminal Defence advocacy, both barristers and solicitor-advocates, with a pilot scheme to take place in 2009. Note the inclusion of an appeals process in the outline scheme. This is clearly intended to play a role in whether individual advocates receive legal aid funding or not.

The LSC email in full:
The LSC is seeking expressions of interest from suppliers with the
experience and capability to provide consultancy expertise in
competence assessment for the QAA Pilot.  The supplier will
research and analyse assessment options that can be used to
effectively assess the defined competence framework for criminal
defence advocacy. They will make recommendations as to the most
effective assessment route(s) that best cover the proposed 4 levels
of advocacy to be tested in the pilot. They will carry out, test,
and evaluate pilot assessments. It is envisaged the pilot will
comprise a maximum of 250 advocates including barristers and
solicitor advocates to be nominated by the QAA Project Team.
Suppliers will be required to work closely with the QAA Project
Team based at the LSC.
The contract will include 3 key stages. These stages will be fully
defined at the ITT stage but are likely to include:

1 Design research.
Research and report on options for assessing the QAA criminal
defence advocacy competencies. The LSC will then decide on which
option(s) are to be tested in the pilot. The supplier will then
design:
The application process
Guidance for applicants
Recording and feedback processes
Appeals process
Options for pass porting and accrediting prior achievements
The supplier will be required to research and report on the
potential for in-house assessment by chambers/firms.
Stage 1 will commence as soon as the contract is awarded. It is
envisaged that this stage will be completed by January 2009.

2 Assessment Testing
Manage pilot assessments of 250 advocates across the proposed 4
levels of advocacy providing data to enable the QAA Project Team to
accurately analyse:
Efficacy of the options tested
Equality and diversity impacts
Cost and sufficiency of assessment routes and appeals
Financial and resource cost to advocates
Consistency of the assessment process.
It is envisaged stage 2 will commence early 2009 and be phased over
a 6 month period. Pilot participants will be nominated by the QAA
Project Team.

3 Evaluation
Provide accurate data to feed in to the overall pilot evaluation
including feedback from pilot participants and evidence sources
such as the judiciary, instructing solicitors, other sources
identified. Provide data to enable a full cost benefit analysis of
the primary assessment route and options tested.

Lacking Support

Published
by
NL
on 21 January 2008
in Legal Aid
. 9 Comments

Tempted though I am to get caught up in Jeremy Paxman’s baggy pants revelations (and don’t you just love the image of Paxman raising his best inquisitorial eyebrow as he questions the occupants of his gym and, of course, the House of Commons as to the adequacy of the tautness of their crotch support), it is another set of briefs lacking sufficient support that must take my attention.

This is, of course, the barristers refusing to sign the LSC contract for Very High Cost Cases for criminal matters. Over on Pupillage and how to get it, Simon Myerson managed a very impressive impression of Emile Zola. His J’Accuse represents not only a thorough demolition of the details of the contract but the LSC’s approach to getting barristers to sign. Simon’s dramatic figures in the post - earnings of just £500 per week during a trial - were only very slightly undermined by his back of the envelope calculation that preparation for a trial could involve pay of £27,000 for a six week period (this for a QC, of course) mentioned in his continued denunciation of the LSC on Charon QC’s weekend review  podcast (Simon Myerson’s portion is separately here, thanks Charon).

Simon made absolutely clear that he wasn’t telling or advising anyone else not to sign. Why? because the LSC has effectively threatened barristers. Anyone who might seem to be conspiring, or organising into a cabal whose dark, secret and sinister powers are everywhere at work but nowhere to be seen, is threatened with civil and criminal prosecution under competition law.

Given the utter lack of evidence for the existence of this shadowy cell of refuseniks, another criminal barrister, Hugo Charlton, has called for the prosecution for attempted blackmail of the hapless LSC official involved. Richard Collins, for it is he, wrote to the bar council last Thursday to suggest that ’some intervening event’ must be behind the lack of barristers signing up, given that they had allowed solicitors to put them forward. Richard, I doubt it is a conspiracy, more that the briefs had actually sat down and looked at the detail for the first time. They are, or at least were, busy people, you know.

This utter madness follows hot on the heels of the disastrous introduction of the directing of all requests for solicitors from those held in police stations through the LSC’s own ‘call a rep’ call centre. This resulted in chaos because of ‘unanticipated demand’, said the LSC. Spare me. Surely it was somebody’s job to actually assess demand, including maximum levels? I doubt that it was a particularly exceptional Friday night, somehow. But then that would require a level of competence that we know, from weary experience, is far beyond the LSC. What Price Justice

Add in the ‘if you won’t play by my rules, I’m taking my ball home’ approach to the termination of the unified civil contract and the prospect of further legal action [PDF] by the Law Society on the continued imposition of the fixed fee regime under that contract, and one has to think that the LSC’s chickens are beginning to come home to roost.

Exodus Part 1 (of many)

Published
by
NL
on 7 January 2008
in Legal Aid
. 0 Comments

The Guardian reports on a survey by the Association of Lawyers for Children. The results are not surprising to anyone facing a legal aid future (although the survey was done before the LSC decision to terminate the unified contract).

One-third of individual solicitors and 40% of law firms planned to reduce their What Price Justicereliance on legal aid work. 17 solicitors had or were just about to give up family legal aid (what proportion was this?). One solicitor reported that a prospective client looking for an urgent domestic violence injunction had called 22 other solicitors without finding a taker. Anecdotally, this doesn’t surprise me. Some of our callers for housing have tried 10 or 11 other firms, and if we can’t take them on, no doubt the other callers will go on to do so. (This is discounting those with no case at all).

[Edit. The survey is here [word doc]. It is a survey taken at the ALC conference in November 2007. 101 survey forms were (mostly) completed. One might have questions about the representativeness of the sample. However, the sample is undoubtedly of experienced and specialised individuals.]

It is the most experienced, often in child care cases, who are looking to pull out, the article suggests. They would be the ones hit hardest in the new fee structure, so this shouldn’t startle anyone.

In Criminal legal aid, the shrinkage continues apace. Fisher Meredith are reportedly pulling out of criminal legal aid work from March. Fisher Meredith are a large specialist legal aid firm. This is a big step.

Naturally, the LSC points out that the very large majority of firms signed up to the unified contrat or the new criminal contract. Of course. The LSC said there wouldn’t be any legacy funding. Why stop dead when you have the opportunity to wind down and make plans for your alternative route?

Following their usual line, the LSC added “Where individual providers have made that decision [to leave], others have been willing to increase their legal aid work accordingly so there has been no impact on access to services.”So far that has been largely true, although it varies by area to area, but while firms are willing to go to their perceived maximum capacity, few are expanding afresh. Once large firms like Fisher Meredith start pulling out, in this case from Criminal, that capacity to absorb will disappear like spring morning mist.

The truth is that the crunch point has arrived. The next 12 months or so will see trend take shape. Up till now, given the sheer chaos of the implementation, everyone was content to wait and see. Now, for Criminal at least, the economics are clear and people will leave, in increasing numbers.

One imagines that about 3 years time, a frantic attempt will be made to rescue the situation by the MoJ/LSC. Any bets on a spin off of the CPS to be the CDS?

Busted

Published
by
NL
on 6 October 2007
in whatever
. 0 Comments

In one of the least surprising brassiere related decisions ever by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, Daniela Scotece has been struck off the roll.

Ms Scotece, an erstwhile criminal defence solicitor at the Nottingham Johnson Partnership, was convicted in April of passing cannabis to a client by smuggling it in to the cell at a Magistrates hearing. The cannabis was concealed in her bra, but that didn’t stop a sniffer dog. Possibly even worse, from the Court’s point of view, she had abused the judicial process to get her client to court.

For some reason the Guardian has now decided she hid the drugs in her knickers, but never mind. I did rather like the Judge at her trial reportedly saying ‘she had completely blurred the line of professional conduct‘. A bit beyond blurring, I’d have thought, as supplying illegal drugs isn’t really a professional grey area.

Also busted is the Government for failing to follow Cabinet Office guidelines in publishing the results of consultation on its proposals to restrict the powers of the Court of Appeal in criminal cases. The Government had failed to make public the fact that senior appeal court judges, the council of circuit judges and the Criminal Cases Review Commission all thought this was a cretinously bad idea.

The measures, restricting the powers of the Court to overturn a guilty verdict where there were procedural faults in the process if the Court still thinks that the Defendant did it, are going for a second reading in Parliament.

Let me just get this clear for myself. If you are convicted as the result of a flawed process - meaning that pre-trial or trial was not carried out properly - your conviction will not be overturned if the appeal court thinks you most likely did it anyway, which can only be on the basis of… well, the evidence in the flawed trial? Brilliant.