Surviving LASPO: how to change your firm's reflection for the better

We have known for over two years that the legal aid changes were coming. We railed against them, campaigned publicly and privately, wrote to our local MPs and the press, and supported clients who were willing to make the details of their case public to the independent Commission of Inquiry into Legal Aid and consequential publicity. As individuals we sit on national committees and provide training and consultancy to a number of companies, charities and professional organisations, many of whom have helped in the campaign to prevent the cuts coming in to force.

Despite all this we are faced with the reality of the legal aid changes that came in earlier this month, and we have had to make difficult business decisions designed to survive them.

The first reality of the cuts was the closure of four of our departments - employment, welfare benefits, debt and community care. Legal aid has been entirely removed for the first of those three and reduced so as to make a profitable department impossible for the fourth.

As a firm who prided themselves on serving a community with all their needs, this has been very difficult to do. None of us yet understand the impact on clients but to us it seems inhumane to bring in the various welfare cuts at the same time as effectively removing the ability to challenge the state about them. The vulnerable are being doubly penalised.

Our remaining three departments are immigration, family and litigation (which includes housing). The departments have entirely different profiles and very different strategies for survival and growth in the coming months and years.

Our immigration department has always been the backbone of the firm, and four of our six partners are immigration practitioners. Post LASPO, we are left with legal aid that covers asylum work, domestic abuse and bail advice for detained clients. The Immigration Removal Centres are subject to 'exclusive contracting' arrangements where a number of providers are permitted to provide advice in each centre. We are one of three providers with a contract to assist those in Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre, in Oxfordshire.

The changes to scope will have a huge impact on our immigration department as we lose upwards of 75 per cent of our current publicly funded work.

A new niche

Since LASPO became a reality, we have been expanding our private immigration work. Most notably we have developed our 'corporate' immigration team - particularly the points based applications that many of us know as 'skilled migration'. This has been challenging, not because we don't have the expertise (which we do) but because we have been battling our own 'profile' as a very well-known publicly funded immigration team. Through patient grafting we have proved to corporate clients that being well known for publicly funded work for individuals does not mean that we cannot offer an excellent service to privately funded and corporate clients.

For individuals, the question is going to be how much of the previously publicly funded work will 'convert' into private work. For those with any ability to pay, we believe we are well positioned to offer high quality work at reasonable and affordable rates (even a reasonable and affordable rate of pay is better than the old legal aid rates). We have some packages already in place, but this period is very much a 'suck it and see' time where we test what the market demands and will bear.

Unfortunately, in immigration, there will remain a hard core of literally destitute clients with no recourse to benefits and no permission to work. Those with supportive family members will be able to tap into the 'reasonable rates' outlined above. For those with no-one to turn to, we are looking at working with Oxford University's pro bono scheme (Oxford Legal Assistance) to see how we can assist a small number of these clients without becoming a charity ourselves (which we cannot afford to do).

With continuing announcements on scope changes for immigration work, this is a very volatile and politically charged area of work.

Our family department has already done a lot of work in putting together discrete packages of private services that cater to those who are losing out on legal aid in the future. It is a department with two partners, myself and Ruth Hawkins, and it operates the Reading office as well as having a large presence in the Oxford office.

Again, we battle against our own reputation for legal aid work to convince private clients we can manage their cases in the way they expect and we have done this proactively through recruitment of solicitors with a particular expertise for private client finance work and maintaining the focus on our reputation for excellence.

We have simplified our private client legal services into three distinct levels:

1. Face2Face - a scheme loosely based on the 'pay as you go' models used by other firms nationally but with the significant difference that we have reduced our hourly rate for this scheme to provide a real solution to clients who are ineligible for legal aid. We charge the client only for the time they spend with us and we do not enter into correspondence on their behalf, represent them at Court, negotiate with the other side or give advice over email or the telephone.

2. Tailor Made - a number of fixed price packages all priced below what they would cost to do if charged at our hourly rates.

3. Hourly rates - this is the usual client/lawyer relationship with all work charged at our competitive hourly rates.

In addition we are very positively expanding into new areas, such as mediation. We currently have one trained mediator but by June will have three and we see it as a natural expansion for family lawyers and an obvious route for a firm such as ours to take. We have always been committed to a negotiated and conciliatory approach in family law and mediation allows separating couples and parents to come to their own, assisted, agreements.

We are also part of a new 24-month pilot scheme, called Family Matters, designed by Resolution and hosted within three firms. The scheme is funded by the DWP's Innovation Fund and will see 'guides' who are lawyer mediators, located in the three firms, providing a free service to separating parents that is designed to steer them through the process in a positive and collaborative way. This scheme will not alleviate the loss of legal aid, because the guides will not provide the parents we see with either legal advice or mediation; but it will help them to decide what they need and assist them to access that advice and support so they can reach agreements together, putting the needs of their children first. We will be 'going live' in Oxford in mid-June 2013.

Our housing and litigation department have been affected by both the legal aid cuts and the litigation costs reforms that came in on the same day. The costs reforms will mean differences in how costs shifting litigation is managed and we expect to see the driving down of success fees as a result.

Legal Aid largely remains for those cases involving the threat of loss of someone's home, for people who are homeless or threatened with homelessness in relation to the provision of accommodation or assistance under Part 6 and Part 7 of the Housing Act 1996.

The biggest hit will be to disrepair cases. There will be no legal aid funding for most cases. It will only be granted where the disrepair relates to a counterclaim to a possession claim or there is a risk to health and safety and would likely be withdrawn if the possession claim is withdrawn, or if works are carried out.

Most housing clients cannot afford to pay privately and conditional fee agreements will, therefore, be the only viable alternative. There is a good success rate on disrepair claims and on the face of it, this is attractive but unlike in personal injury cases, which were the focus for the Jackson reforms, there is no protection for the claimant in terms of costs.This department is investigating unbundling to litigants in person where they conduct their own litigation and obtain professional help for specific tasks (for example, drafting particulars of claim or advising on disclosure) or fixed price packages for particular pieces of work (such as representing them at a hearing).

We also work closely with local agencies to support vulnerable clients and will be exploring ways of continuing to do so for those who are no longer eligible for legal aid. We are focusing on two particular ways of doing this - providing training for agency workers to assist those with cases that will no longer be funded, and the continuation of the court duty scheme that we run every week to assist those who find themselves in court facing possession applications. This scheme is funded separately by the Legal Aid Agency and has not been affected by the cuts.

As a firm we have been proactive and creative in trying to find alternatives for clients faced by very difficult situations and needing help. We hope these will enable clients to access assistance and us to survive the changes, but only time will tell.