Roger Smith casts an eye over the comings & goings in the legal world
Lord McNally, the legal aid minister, was in unusually shaky form when presenting the government’s proposals for price competitive tendering at a Westminster Legal Policy Forum meeting at the end of April. Presenting his prepared text without energy, he departed at speed once it was over.
The minister’s message was as dispiriting as his delivery. It amounted to saying that legal aid practitioners need to diversify into more rewarding work: “It cannot be right that we have seen firms subsisting solely on public money. Where a business model relies solely on one source of revenue, of course it exposes itself to a level of risk when times start to change.” This is somewhat at variance with policy over the last 20 years which has been to encourage specialist providers and to discard others who were often derided as “dabblers”. Lord McNally’s message was somewhat bleaker than when he announced the assumption of his new legal aid responsibilities to the Legal Aid Practitioners Group last year: “Rest assured we will be listening
