Reviewed by: David R Pickup
Author: General editors: Andrew Otterburn and Vicky Ling
Publisher: Law Society Publishing
ISBN: 9781907698491
Price: £69.95

My name is David and I am a legal aid lawyer. There, I have admitted my addiction. Many of us in the profession are addicted to legal aid. We started experimenting with green forms years ago and then went on to the hard stuff – certificated cases and even high-cost cases. We are addicts. All governments know this.

This book is for addicts. It starts with a synopsis of the forthcoming statutory changes and then looks at your addiction and considers how to do something about it. The book has case studies between each chapter – one-page stories on how different firms have coped or are coping. I found these unhelpful until I realised there is a progression from legal aid dinosaurs like me who just carry on; to firms doing something about it; then to practices which have kicked the habit completely.

There is a list of questions for those of us in trouble: ‘Do you wake at 4am and cannot get back to sleep? Do you pray for the day to end? Do you dread looking at letters marked "Private and Confidential"?’ There are fairly short chapters on giving up legal aid contracts, closing an office or merging a practice. I would have liked to see more in these sections. But the book has a useful CD with forms and checklists which you can adapt for your firm.

The main issue for the profession is not how to make legal aid profitable – you cannot. Instead we need to know how to do more private work. The book has helpful suggestions on that. It also covers opening a ‘Law Shop’ or doing more in-house advocacy. I suspect we legal aid dinosaurs will simply die out; not because of a meteor crashing into the planet, but because there are no youngsters wanting to do it and why should they? This is a book for the young private fee-earner to give to the old legal aid dinosaur.

What I would like is for the things we as a profession can change, to actually change. It is the other costs that get us: training, insurance, costs of practice and the administrative burdens. Our regulators cannot change government policy or make solicitors popular, but can reduce the other costs.

David Pickup is a partner at Aylesbury-based Pickup & Scott

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