IT horror show

In October, the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) will be making it compulsory for all legal aid applications and billing to be done online.

Sounds good, you might think. Surely an online process will speed things up, do away with
a whole heap of paper. What
could possibly go wrong? After all, buying a book on Amazon takes all of 30 seconds, booking
a holiday takes only five minutes. Even completing a tax return online is a huge improvement on queuing at the local post office. We live in a digital age and know that doing some things this way
is a time saver. It is what we like to refer to as 'progress'.

The head of IT at the LAA came to a meeting at the Law Society
in 2011. He told us about their project, which he thought would be implemented within two years. The question was asked about previous government
IT projects and how they had
all gone disastrously wrong.
We queried how robust the legal aid project was. 'Very robust'
was the reply.

In 2012, the project began testing in the North East of England. I sat on a committee overseeing the project for about
a year before I resigned in July 2013. It was patently obvious that the software designed to deal with legal aid applications and billing was not there to speed up the process for practitioners, but simply to allow fewer people to have to deal with matters at
the LAA.

Worse still, the software was
so old, inefficient, and impractical that it was taking four hours to make a simple application for legal aid. In comparison, a paper-based application might take 45 minutes.

The client and cost management system (CCMS) regularly breaks down, times out, and was described by one of my more computer literate staff as the worst piece of software they had ever dealt with. Another staff member is regularly coming into work on Saturdays as she simply does not have time to deal with the rest of her work after trying to get CCMS to work, speaking to the help desk when it crashes, and trying to follow-up requests for further information which the system constantly generates.

My firm is far from a bunch of Luddites. We are embracing this vile piece of technology. But while 75 per cent of our recent applications have been online,
I have to wonder at the price. Spending hours to do what you used to be able to do in a matter of minutes is ridiculous.

Why did the LAA not design customised software to do
the job? If it took the average punter 45 minutes and visits to
16 different screens, Amazon would not be selling many books. Instead, it would appear that CCMS is 'off-the-peg' rather than specifically designed for the
task and, frankly, hopeless at achieving its stated aims.

Legal aid lawyers are a hard-pressed bunch. Never the best paid, always having to put up with cuts and bureaucracy,
and now we have to spend substantial amounts of unpaid time messing about with a horror show in the form of a new software system.

As feared, this is just another government IT disaster. SJ

Russell Conway is senior partner at Oliver Fisher Solicitors