The best legal aid system in the world is slipping through our fingers

Times are hard for lawyers at the bottom end of the market. They are being stretched by falling revenues, increasing overheads, the costs of technology and the time spent on regulation.

The legal aid sector has had an even worse experience with a real decrease in revenues and many types of work no longer coming within scope.

We are hearing daily horror stories of firms going bust and staff being made redundant,
and it could be the case that things will get worse before
they get better.

I have always taken the view that larger, more profitable
firms owe an obligation to the legal aid sector. Colleagues
whom I met at university have gone on to the City firms and
are earning astonishingly high salaries: £300,000–£500,000 is
not uncommon. When I tell them that legal aid lawyers are paid between £30,000 and £50,000 they observe me with dumb amusement.

The BBC recently ran a piece
on job satisfaction and average salaries. Solicitors came 44th
out of a list of 274 types of employment. Interestingly the average salary was £44,787. This is an average throughout the sector and it will show rather starkly the imbalance between salaries in the bigger City & West End firms and smaller legal aid practices.

I know that bigger firms will
cry that they have huge pro
bono budgets, but pro bono is one thing. Seeing the legal aid sector collapse and wither away
is another altogether.

Firms with large profits should be obliged by the Law Society to partner with a legal aid practice. They should mentor, train, support and allow such practices to continue. Larger firms have the resources to do this. Most legal aid practices don’t have managers in HR, IT
or marketing.

I recently visited a colleague in the West End and was impressed that his HR department consisted of three people; another firm had six people devoted to IT.

If small legal aid practices
had the ability to tap into this level of support and were mentored in ways that allowed their business model to change, we may yet be able to save this very valuable part of the
legal marketplace.

Larger firms have a part to
play in this. Simply sending out some trainees to a law centre is not good enough.

A working partnership between larger and smaller
firms needs to be recognised as
a meaningful way forward to sustain what was once the best legal aid system in the world.

While the Ministry of Justice is constantly berating the system and calling it one of the most expensive in the world (those figures are challenged incidentally), we should not
lose sight of the fact that we also have the fourth most expensive defence expenditure in the world. Yet the collapse
of our army or navy is not imminent. Legal aid needs
a shot in the arm.

Help is desperately required and help is at hand. It just needs to be organised.

Who knows? Perhaps smaller firms can introduce some of their own practices to bigger outfits, like the joys of having
a pet Labrador in the office. SJ

Russell Conway is senior partner at Oliver Fisher