Well, a lot has happened since I last talked to myself on here.
I finally left my job! I spent 6 months poking at another firm saying Gis a Job, Gis a Job, and finally they gave in. It's a firm that only does criminal law - magistrates, crown and prison law. Where my soul is.
I couldn't take the Other Place any more - it was badly run, not many clients were actually helped by our intervention, and everyone hated working there.
The New Place is run by eccentrics and staffed by the same, and it's bloody marvellous. Everyone there is there because they love what they do, are passionate, and believe in true social justice. Many of us have had a rough time, for various reasons, and most of us are a little quirky. But everyone is warm, friendly, and amazing at their jobs and I love it!
As far as Legal Aid is concerned, I've really only swapped one set of issues for another. Civil is currently sounding its deathrattle, and quite frankly I don't expect that anything will radically change from the bill to it being enacted. Defeatist, but sadly probably true. The combination of cuts, job losses and the loss of the vast majority of Civil Legal Aid is truly abhorrent. And the effect will be the marginalisation of many of society, impotent to challenge wrong decisions, see their kids, divorce, etc etc.
Criminal law and its problems sees even less media coverage/public sympathy. Mainly because it deals with those in society that we would rather pretend didn't exist. The druggies, alcoholics, ASBO kids, gangs, kiddy fiddlers...... Criminal defence lawyers are ranked scum too - to be honest, that doesn't bother me one iota - it's other people's prejudices that lead to that conclusion, not mine. Who's the first person (apart from your mum) that you'd call if you were arrested......? A solicitor. Necessary evil we are. Like flypaper.
One of the major proposals for cuts within crime ( apart from general cutting of fees) is that it is proposed that advice in the police station is means tested. At the moment, EVERYONE is entitled to speak to a solicitor free of charge when arrested and taken to a police station, and the chances are, to have a legal representative present when you are interviewed.
Imagine you are arrested in the middle of the night and dragged to the police station. Probably in your boxer shorts. If you're lucky, the police let you get dressed. Would you have the time or presence of mind to grab 3 wage slips? No? Well tough, you'll be on your own in the police station.
Will you know if they have the right to search your house? Take your computer and phone? Take intimate samples? Keep you for 24 hours? Should you answer questions or keep silent? No? This government says tough, you should know a solicitor, and be able to pay them before you have any of these questions answered. Seem fair?
The reality is not many people will care. Unless it happens to them. And that's where all the Legal Aid cuts collide. They aren't vote winners. They don't affect Middle England.
....but I love my job..... as long as it lasts. The death knell is starting to toll quietly for Criminal Legal Aid, and it won't be long before it becomes deafening.
Monday, 25 July 2011
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
Playing the Game
The Game in question is difficult to define. I am no good at it however. Many of my colleagues are very good at it. They attend and hold many meetings, conduct many reviews and advocate many presentations to other people who are good at It.
What never seems to be done is much actual work. Actually seeing clients and achieving what the client wants to achieve. There is much bluster about Judicial Reviews, appeals and everlasting pointing out minor errors on the part of the Other Side. What no-one seems to ask is what the client actually wants.
We have one case where we have not seen or spoken to the client for over SIX months. We are progressing the appeal and review and general arsing about, but what no-one has done is actually see if the client WANTS us to do this.
I am loath to say this. In fact I may drink to forget later on, but I think David Cameron might be a little bit right about charities. The more contact I have with them, and the more I see of the work they do, the more it concerns me, the level of funding they receive. In a lot of cases to do no more than refer the person on to another charity, who will 'assess' the client and refer them on again. I am wholeheartedly NOT saying this generally about charitable organisations - there are many who do amazing work on very little money.
My own opinion is also that sometimes, the more places a person is referred to, the more that person becomes convinced that whatever the issue, is Someone Else's Responsibility. No-one seems to help them to take charge of their own lives. The charity becomes a crutch for them, not a helping hand.
In my own personal life, I have some shite going on. Some of it is my own doing, some of it is not. I could refer myself to many of these agencies for 'help'. I could scream and bemoan my lot (well, I do actually do that to be fair), but what I don't do is expect someone else to pick me up and do it all for me. Some might say that maybe I should learn to ask for help. In my darkest moments I have ( I got brief counselling after my father's hideous lingering death), but then you dust yourself off and move on.
In other words, the Game seems to be what some Not for Profit organisations are good at. Morally, I find it difficult to be a part of that. Practically, I need to pay the mortgage, and the private sector is fucked (daring to try and make a profit was not playing the Game apparently). I will need to get better at looking Very Busy and Important. And hold more meetings.
What never seems to be done is much actual work. Actually seeing clients and achieving what the client wants to achieve. There is much bluster about Judicial Reviews, appeals and everlasting pointing out minor errors on the part of the Other Side. What no-one seems to ask is what the client actually wants.
We have one case where we have not seen or spoken to the client for over SIX months. We are progressing the appeal and review and general arsing about, but what no-one has done is actually see if the client WANTS us to do this.
I am loath to say this. In fact I may drink to forget later on, but I think David Cameron might be a little bit right about charities. The more contact I have with them, and the more I see of the work they do, the more it concerns me, the level of funding they receive. In a lot of cases to do no more than refer the person on to another charity, who will 'assess' the client and refer them on again. I am wholeheartedly NOT saying this generally about charitable organisations - there are many who do amazing work on very little money.
My own opinion is also that sometimes, the more places a person is referred to, the more that person becomes convinced that whatever the issue, is Someone Else's Responsibility. No-one seems to help them to take charge of their own lives. The charity becomes a crutch for them, not a helping hand.
In my own personal life, I have some shite going on. Some of it is my own doing, some of it is not. I could refer myself to many of these agencies for 'help'. I could scream and bemoan my lot (well, I do actually do that to be fair), but what I don't do is expect someone else to pick me up and do it all for me. Some might say that maybe I should learn to ask for help. In my darkest moments I have ( I got brief counselling after my father's hideous lingering death), but then you dust yourself off and move on.
In other words, the Game seems to be what some Not for Profit organisations are good at. Morally, I find it difficult to be a part of that. Practically, I need to pay the mortgage, and the private sector is fucked (daring to try and make a profit was not playing the Game apparently). I will need to get better at looking Very Busy and Important. And hold more meetings.
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
More Legal Aid rantings.
Well I keep meaning to update this, but life got in the way, and the letters m, ' and @ don't work on my laptop anymore. Happily I have dug out an old keyboard and the laptop now resembles something from Back to the Future.
My main gripe/rant is still legal aid, and the cuts thereof, so stop reading now if you don't care.
I've been going through (yet again) the Green Paper on this, and what I keep coming back to is the disproportionate effect on women, those with disabilities, the mentally ill and those of ethnic minorities. When I was in private practice, the people who needed face to face advice were:
- those who didnt have access to a phone - whether they didn't have one, the violent partner wouldn't let them access one, or their English wasn't good enough.
- those with mental illnesses who needed the reassurance of a real person in front of them
- people with literally carrier bags of correspondence from debt companies/other solicitors about eg contact with their kids and who want and need to hand it over to someone to deal with
-people who have drug or alcohol misuse issues who need to come in first thing in the morning when they can take in advice.
-people who couldn't read the letters we sent out to them - we regularly sent out blank letterheads to clients who couldn't read and had no phone. They recognised the logo, and came in to see what we needed!
In my northern rural market town practice, we essentially offered a legal version of a GP - we covered most things, and deferred to specialists if need be. We and the other practices considered ourselves part of the community, and we served that community as best we could. My own practice regularly gave free advice because we believed that everyone should have access, regardless of ability to pay, and the senior partner passionately believed in social justice. He even has 'Justitia omnibus' on his gravestone.
Increasingly, because of the constraints put upon us mainly from Legal Aid, we had to drop services like debt and welfare advice and hope the CABs would take up the slack. By the time I gave up and gave the practice away (yeah - note 'gave' not sold - by then no-one in their right minds would BUY a practice with legal aid contracts!) we had become little more than yet another anonymous company obsessed with targets and policies.
That was a lament for the rose tinted past, sorry. My point was supposed to be that we served the community. This government is suggesting that anyone in future wanting legal aid, should phone ONE SINGLE NATIONAL number, and be told where they can go for advice, IF they are allowed to go at all. If it is deemed that their problem can be solved in a phone call, well they won't get to actually see anyone. It will all be dealt with facelessly. What happened to the Big Society? What happened to looking after people who need help? Do we honestly think we can discharge our social responsibility by giving people who have no phones a call centre number?? Human contact is sorely underestimated, and personally I find it difficult to tell over the phone if a client has genuinely taken in what I have told them - I need to read their expression, and I'm sure clients must feel the same.
All that leads to my second rant - work! Having been my own boss for so long, and been able to voice my opinion freely, it's very hard being subject to restrictions by my boss on what I can comment on. The short answer is I'm not allowed to comment publicly on the cuts, what they mean for clients or any potential redundancies within the firm.
To be frank, this boils my piss.
The company relies on legal aid, the Financial Inclusion Fund and other local funding, all of which have either just been cut, or are about to. Not even being 'allowed' to post links to newspaper articles on the cuts on Facebook makes me feel like a truculent teenager.
I have had offers from various national papers and professional journals to give my opinion on the cuts, and the effect this will have on clients and the workforce, and I can't comment. Given the national apathy on the cuts to legal aid, ANY raising of the profile is good. The only thing I have been able to do is part of the company response to the Green Paper. As long as I didn't denounce telephone advice, and eschewed the traditional methods of delivery i.e. a PR exercise. It reads like a press release.
Unless the company has a frigging millionaire behind the scenes, the likelihood is that it will not survive. I am not party to any discussions that management has, but quite frankly not many services like ours will survive without that much wished for motherfucking fairy. And the loss to clients will be catastrophic.
:
My main gripe/rant is still legal aid, and the cuts thereof, so stop reading now if you don't care.
I've been going through (yet again) the Green Paper on this, and what I keep coming back to is the disproportionate effect on women, those with disabilities, the mentally ill and those of ethnic minorities. When I was in private practice, the people who needed face to face advice were:
- those who didnt have access to a phone - whether they didn't have one, the violent partner wouldn't let them access one, or their English wasn't good enough.
- those with mental illnesses who needed the reassurance of a real person in front of them
- people with literally carrier bags of correspondence from debt companies/other solicitors about eg contact with their kids and who want and need to hand it over to someone to deal with
-people who have drug or alcohol misuse issues who need to come in first thing in the morning when they can take in advice.
-people who couldn't read the letters we sent out to them - we regularly sent out blank letterheads to clients who couldn't read and had no phone. They recognised the logo, and came in to see what we needed!
In my northern rural market town practice, we essentially offered a legal version of a GP - we covered most things, and deferred to specialists if need be. We and the other practices considered ourselves part of the community, and we served that community as best we could. My own practice regularly gave free advice because we believed that everyone should have access, regardless of ability to pay, and the senior partner passionately believed in social justice. He even has 'Justitia omnibus' on his gravestone.
Increasingly, because of the constraints put upon us mainly from Legal Aid, we had to drop services like debt and welfare advice and hope the CABs would take up the slack. By the time I gave up and gave the practice away (yeah - note 'gave' not sold - by then no-one in their right minds would BUY a practice with legal aid contracts!) we had become little more than yet another anonymous company obsessed with targets and policies.
That was a lament for the rose tinted past, sorry. My point was supposed to be that we served the community. This government is suggesting that anyone in future wanting legal aid, should phone ONE SINGLE NATIONAL number, and be told where they can go for advice, IF they are allowed to go at all. If it is deemed that their problem can be solved in a phone call, well they won't get to actually see anyone. It will all be dealt with facelessly. What happened to the Big Society? What happened to looking after people who need help? Do we honestly think we can discharge our social responsibility by giving people who have no phones a call centre number?? Human contact is sorely underestimated, and personally I find it difficult to tell over the phone if a client has genuinely taken in what I have told them - I need to read their expression, and I'm sure clients must feel the same.
All that leads to my second rant - work! Having been my own boss for so long, and been able to voice my opinion freely, it's very hard being subject to restrictions by my boss on what I can comment on. The short answer is I'm not allowed to comment publicly on the cuts, what they mean for clients or any potential redundancies within the firm.
To be frank, this boils my piss.
The company relies on legal aid, the Financial Inclusion Fund and other local funding, all of which have either just been cut, or are about to. Not even being 'allowed' to post links to newspaper articles on the cuts on Facebook makes me feel like a truculent teenager.
I have had offers from various national papers and professional journals to give my opinion on the cuts, and the effect this will have on clients and the workforce, and I can't comment. Given the national apathy on the cuts to legal aid, ANY raising of the profile is good. The only thing I have been able to do is part of the company response to the Green Paper. As long as I didn't denounce telephone advice, and eschewed the traditional methods of delivery i.e. a PR exercise. It reads like a press release.
Unless the company has a frigging millionaire behind the scenes, the likelihood is that it will not survive. I am not party to any discussions that management has, but quite frankly not many services like ours will survive without that much wished for motherfucking fairy. And the loss to clients will be catastrophic.
:
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
More Legal Aid ranting, now with added housing reform rant
It's been a while since I wrote on this blog. Partly because no-one reads it anyway, and partly because I have had my head wedged firmly up my own backside for a month.
I only came back to it as I posted on my Conservative MP's blog today. Mainly because he thinks the 'reforms' to housing issues are a marvellous idea. Housing law practitioners don't.
Read this:
http://nearlylegal.co.uk/blog/
It's a blog written by some housing law practitioners, and when I did housing law, was considered to be the best, most up-to-date and well written way to keep up with new cases and law. If they think this reform is a bad idea, it probably is.
The new proposals are, on first glance to the average Daily Mail reader, a marvellous idea. Get rid of noisy tenants quickly? Sorted. The devil is in the detail as the blog states. Sadly there is no detail as yet. What constitutes an annoying tenant etc etc? And don't forget, the tenant probably won't get any legal aid to defend what may be a vexatious claim.
ANYWAY, it was my first foray into contacting an MP about anything - let's see if he responds at all! If you're reading Guy Opperman, I'm not sure where you stand on most issues apart from housing, and snow on local roads. It would be useful for your blog to say a little more than how many local people you have met
On the subject of Legal Aid (which is a subject which I will bang on about ad infinitum so if it bores you, leave now), JusticeForAll held their lobby campaign launch today at Westminster. They have huge support from the legal community, and it seems that many MPs attended (not sure why yet, or in what capacity - for all I know, free muffins were being handed out). I don't hold out much hope of the Green Paper being substantially amended from what we have now, but at least the legal community has finally got it's collective arses up and done something joined up.
Me? I'm currently expecting to be made redundant - well, the company I work for gets most of its funding from either Legal Aid, or other government funding, so unless a motherfucking fairy appears, then my, and many others (around the country as well ) work days are numbered.
Next blog? What other job can I possibly do seeing as my career is being made redundant by this government? I could retrain, but I can't afford to - I can't afford tuition fees, a giant mortgage, 2 kids, and an imminently expensive divorce. Shipping law appears to be the only area still advertising jobs. Think they want a jaded legal aid solicitor?? Worth a CV I guess.
If anyone is interested, links to more information:
http://www.justice-for-all.org.uk/
http://mylegal.org.uk/
http://guyopperman.blogspot.com/
I only came back to it as I posted on my Conservative MP's blog today. Mainly because he thinks the 'reforms' to housing issues are a marvellous idea. Housing law practitioners don't.
Read this:
http://nearlylegal.co.uk/blog/
It's a blog written by some housing law practitioners, and when I did housing law, was considered to be the best, most up-to-date and well written way to keep up with new cases and law. If they think this reform is a bad idea, it probably is.
The new proposals are, on first glance to the average Daily Mail reader, a marvellous idea. Get rid of noisy tenants quickly? Sorted. The devil is in the detail as the blog states. Sadly there is no detail as yet. What constitutes an annoying tenant etc etc? And don't forget, the tenant probably won't get any legal aid to defend what may be a vexatious claim.
ANYWAY, it was my first foray into contacting an MP about anything - let's see if he responds at all! If you're reading Guy Opperman, I'm not sure where you stand on most issues apart from housing, and snow on local roads. It would be useful for your blog to say a little more than how many local people you have met
On the subject of Legal Aid (which is a subject which I will bang on about ad infinitum so if it bores you, leave now), JusticeForAll held their lobby campaign launch today at Westminster. They have huge support from the legal community, and it seems that many MPs attended (not sure why yet, or in what capacity - for all I know, free muffins were being handed out). I don't hold out much hope of the Green Paper being substantially amended from what we have now, but at least the legal community has finally got it's collective arses up and done something joined up.
Me? I'm currently expecting to be made redundant - well, the company I work for gets most of its funding from either Legal Aid, or other government funding, so unless a motherfucking fairy appears, then my, and many others (around the country as well ) work days are numbered.
Next blog? What other job can I possibly do seeing as my career is being made redundant by this government? I could retrain, but I can't afford to - I can't afford tuition fees, a giant mortgage, 2 kids, and an imminently expensive divorce. Shipping law appears to be the only area still advertising jobs. Think they want a jaded legal aid solicitor?? Worth a CV I guess.
If anyone is interested, links to more information:
http://www.justice-for-all.org.uk/
http://mylegal.org.uk/
http://guyopperman.blogspot.com/
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