A practitioner group has embarked on a data drive so that it can hand to the government hard proof of the amount of time spent by legal aid lawyers on unbillable work.

The Legal Aid Practitioners Group revealed at its annual conference this month that it is conducting research to quantify the time legal aid providers invest in ‘unchargeable’ tasks. The data will be based on 10 working days, with firms recording casework-related and non-casework related tasks.

Operations director Anna Neira Quesada said the research project has four objectives:

  • To demonstrate that having a legal aid contract comes with unavoidable and hidden costs;
  • To tell the Ministry of Justice that certain tasks are so intrinsic within the legal aid contract they cannot be considered unchargeable or unbillable;
  • To make the Ministry of Justice and Legal Aid Agency aware of duplication in the billing process;
  • To show that the legal aid scheme is unnecessarily complex and burdensome.

The pilot phase of the project has just finished. LAPG now wants to recruit a wider pool of practitioners. 'The more representative the sample is, the stronger the argument will be when we present it to the Ministry of Justice', Neira Quesada said.

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The data will be the latest in a growing body of evidence highlighting the challenges and pressures faced by lawyers every day doing publicly funded work.

Earlier this year the Law Society published economic analysis showing that lawyers lost money doing housing legal aid work but felt morally obliged to keep going.