The “rot” set in for legal aid a few years before LASPO, writes Jon Robins in this week’s NLJ. Civil and family legal aid firms have nearly halved in number since 2007/08, for example, although they shrunk by almost a further quarter in the last year, and the number of acts of assistance under the civil legal aid scheme reduced by almost two-thirds in the last four years. Recent research has also borne out predictions that the cuts to the legal infrastructure have adversely affected those parts of the system that survived the cull.