This is not a headline you will normally see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Firstly, I should like to acknowledge Krish, who tweets at @TheTCHawk, for providing the inspiration for this blogpost. He has recently written on his experience with the Citizens Advice Bureau for which he works.

Instead, I have been working in a famous law centre in London for the last few months. This has been an incredibly rewarding for me, as I am looking forward to studying law further in my LPC in January 2012. I have already spent four years in legal training, but one of the many things that I have learnt of some importance is that lawyers do not get emotional.

Once I was aghast when a law student tweeted at a friend of mine, “Is there a difference between a law centre and a CAB?” However, it was a perfectly reasonable question.  As members of law centres, we must confront this issue of what we’re (=law centres) doing that’s different from CABs. Marketing professionals must have an understanding of the awareness of any particular brand, for example the CAB or the law centre, before proceeding to develop a marketing strategy. I feel that law centres will need to develop a professional marketing strategy to raise their awareness amongst the community and investors. In my belief, whilst the CABx brand is very strong indeed, perhaps for historical reasons, the ‘Law Centre brand’ is virtually non-existent in comparison. I would be interested to know whether this is borne out by any hard data.

I have been thinking about how my law centre, especially my area of welfare benefits advice for disabled citizens like me, can benefit from alternative sources of funding, like the Big Lottery Fund, but this fundamentally depends on what pitch I should make. Is it that we are any more central to the communiy than the CAB? Or is it that we have more specialist qualified legal advisors than the CAB who can act as advocates? Are any generalisations possible or warranted? Furthermore, legal aid funding affects private practice stakeholders, as well as legal centres and CABs, and market forces affect all three. For all stakeholders to benefit the public the most, which is their ultimate aim after all, they need to have a clear idea of their values and which services they’re providing, so that all stakeholders can achieve optimal market and strategic positioning in a crowded, funding-challenged, market, perhaps.

Whatever – I personally think all legal practitioners should be given support, acknowledging that funds are limited. but funding bodies will have to prioritise unfortunately. In fact, a focus on funding may have the beneficial effect of providing better precision to all stakeholders in their strategy and core competences of their legal services, whatever sector they are in. However, fundamentally, I most agree with the observation that, at this late stage, arguing over a sense of entitlement is totally unhelpful. It is desperately important that we fight until the end for our common purpose in protecting legal aid. I would find it very hard to support law centres if they wished to campaign at the expense of CABx or other stakeholders, but they should think about how they differ from other stakeholders when applying for London Borough grants for community investment or structural upkeep, I feel.

Immediately this throws you into the territory that, as a lawyer to-be one day hopefully, I am getting emotional. Worse than that, I am getting political. Of course, central to the whole debate, is access-to-law and the rule of law. The Law Society and Bar Council provide that the legal aid cuts offend this fundamental right, and indeed many blogposts and the Guardianistas have thus far pressed home this  vital point. However, an issue that my colleagues in the Law Centre I work at feel enormous frustration at the fact we are simply unable to get our message across.

We have, as citizens of society, to acknowledge that no political party will be in power forever, and it is not impossible that this Bill will become repealed in time or amended drastically. I feel that all employees in all legal institutions should not feel frightened in giving a voice to the opinions of citizens wishing to protect legal aid, and should be allowed to express such opinions in this organisational change.  As part of my MBA, I studied in enormous detail critical success factors for relatively-rapid organisational change like this in the public sector, and by far the most important issues are trust and openness in the followers (including legal professionals) in ensuring the change goes smoothly. This is in addition to the demanding structural changes which are necessitated in this reform.

An issue is that the Legal Aid and Sentencing Bill, as proposed, could have a selectively detrimental effect on certain groups of society, including the disabled. Many of us have been prone to defend our own patch, and there is somewhat an element of ‘divide-and-rule’ in the debate which has ensued. Yet again, whilst I find repugnant that welfare benefits legal advice is being cut at the expense of some other fields of law, I feel that we all should be pulling in the same direction of protecting all areas of law (but especially for the socially disadvantaged.)  In other words, lawyers and bloggers appear to the outside world to be not “in it together“,  talking at cross-purposes, and becoming constituted by tribalistic vocal subgroups which are easy to ‘defeat’ as a whole. Secondly, I believe, that there is an element of where looking forward to the holiday has become more exciting than the holiday itself. I had a feeling of this in our opposition to the Health and Social Care Bill, where Labour loved opposing, but were completely incompetent in articulating arguments about competition, quality, value and cost in the NHS. Indeed, further, like perhaps #OccupyLSX, the opposition for the left has become more exciting than the substantive points of the opposition itself; I do not deny the inspiring success of @SoundOffJustice, and others. In fact, I met them at the DODS meeting in September, and was overawed personally about how much passion they had put into their campaign.

Thirdly, some elements of the ‘progressive left’, for example the Liberal Democrats, perhaps could have been more articulate about the effects of the legal aid policy on children, families, and wellbeing, which are now central planks of Liberal Democrat policy. Fourthly, whatever the reasons for it, the Legal Services Commission has been criticised, and there is a huge amount which could be done to improve the legal aid funding mess which has developed for a number of decades, including the last Labour governments? Whilst I do not feel the need to be perjorative in quoting the “most expensive service in Europe” statistic, which is actually untrue, we do need to address how best to develop legal aid funding. Fifthly, and this is an economic and quasi-political argument, I am a Keynesian and I do not agree with the ‘maxing out the credit card analogy’, but likewise, albeit as an utilitarian, I do believe we have to prioritise given the deficit which has come around in a large part through recapitalising the banks in #gfc1 (a policy which I am still uncertain about).

Finally, we need to get people interested in this subject in the media. I don’t mean the Guardianistas necessarily, otherwise we’re preaching to the converted. Whilst Sepp Blatter and racism, superinjunctions, anonymised injunctions and Andy Marr, and the BBC’s Children in Need are very important issues, we could do with much more focused coverage and debate of the Legal Aid and Sentencing Bill. I think this is essential, as I bet my life that this will obtain Royal Assent without any difficulty in due course.