\n<\/p>\n
Lawyers have warned that a cyber-attack on the Legal Aid Agency has pushed the sector into chaos, with barristers going unpaid, cases being turned away and fears a growing number of firms could desert legal aid work altogether.<\/p>\n
In May, the legal aid agency announced that the personal data of hundreds of thousands of legal aid applicants in England and Wales dating back to 2010 had been accessed and downloaded in a significant cyber-attack.<\/p>\n
Three months on, much of the legal aid system remains offline as services are being rebuilt, with lawyers unable to access records or bill for their services, particularly in civil cases.<\/p>\n
Chris Minnoch, the chief executive of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, said he had had members calling him in tears, staying up into the night waiting for payments to come through and having to negotiate extended overdrafts.<\/p>\n
\u201cLots of barristers and solicitors are saying to us: this is the straw that breaks the camel\u2019s back. We wouldn\u2019t be surprised that by the time things are eventually fixed, there will be fewer [legal aid] providers because people just can\u2019t take the stress any more,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Although the Legal Aid Agency has set up a contingency payment system, where legal aid practitioners can apply for weekly payments equivalent to the average they were paid in the three months running up to the hack, many said it was not enough.<\/p>\n
One barrister working primarily on legal aid cases, who asked not to be named, said they were offered only \u00a39.50 a week under the contingency scheme.<\/p>\n
\u201cIts obviously really laughable and I know a lot of colleagues were offered a very low rate,\u201d they said. \u201cI am still doing legal aid work, but financially I am not in a good position. I\u2019ve had to think about other forms of income, rely more on my partner, and I\u2019m just not able to afford certain things that I would otherwise.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s particularly had a really massive impact on barristers from working-class backgrounds.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jenny Beck KC, of Beck Fitzgerald, which specialises in supporting victims of domestic abuse, said the contingency payments had enabled the legal firm to keep going, but could cause a headache further down the line.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are based on a guesstimate, so if we underclaim or overclaim, we\u2019ll be in some difficulty,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re literally flying blind in an area where there\u2019s no margin to play with. So from a business perspective, it\u2019s deeply dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said lawyers were spending at least an extra two hours on each case due to online systems being down and they were having to turn away more people as a result. \u201cThe bottom-line impact is that we can look after fewer clients because our processing times for everything are longer,\u201d she said. \u201cWe now have to keep a manual note of everything; we\u2019ve gone back to paper which we\u2019re later going to have to input.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got no management information, we\u2019ve got no control over our cashflow, and everyone at the frontline is beleaguered and exhausted because their administrative hours have doubled and they\u2019re able to help less people.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n She also said the hack had badly damaged trust with vulnerable clients. \u201cThe people who are at most risk and who need confidentiality like nobody else, we\u2019re telling them, well, we\u2019ve been putting your stuff into an unsafe system,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a major erosion of trust.\u201d<\/p>\n There have long been concerns about legal aid \u201cdeserts\u201d as lawyers have gradually withdrawn from services due to lack of funding, and there are fears the long-term consequence of the hack will be less access to justice for the most vulnerable in society.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re constantly forced to turn away work because we just don\u2019t have capacity to, and that was happening even before the hack just because of the limited funding of legal aid,\u201d said Abbi Hart, the co-chair of Young Legal Aid Lawyers. \u201cThis is just going to make it worse. The system was in a pretty bad way beforehand, now it\u2019s even more concerning.\u201d<\/p>\n A Legal Aid Agency spokesperson said: <\/strong>\u201cWe apologise for the disruption the changes to payment processes made in response to the cyber attack have caused. We understand the difficulties this is causing civil legal aid providers and are working as quickly as possible to restore online systems.<\/p>\n \u201cA contingency system is in place and barristers and solicitors can use our simple escalation process if they feel the average pay figure is inaccurate.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lawyers have warned that a cyber-attack on the Legal Aid Agency has pushed the sector into chaos, with barristers going unpaid, cases being turned away and fears a growing number of firms could desert legal aid work altogether. In May, the legal aid agency announced that the personal data of hundreds of thousands of legal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1122,2345,3641,2541,324,3058,1534],"class_list":{"0":"post-13878","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-aid","9":"tag-collapse","10":"tag-cyberattack","11":"tag-lawyers","12":"tag-legal","13":"tag-pushed","14":"tag-sector"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}