Lawyers Voting With Their Feet Over Legal Aid

Almost 800 lawyers put their finger in the air in respect of the new legal aid providers' scheme.  The ADLS Law News reports on the time-consuming, process-driven, administratively burdonsome new legal aid suppliers provision and how it could work out worse than the scheme it's replaced.

A total of 791 lawyers from around the country did not reapply to be legal aid providers by the Ministry of Justice’s cut-off date of December 31, 2011 and, as a result, about 1500 legal aid cases will need to be reassigned to other lawyers.

Ministry of Justice Provider and Community Services Director, Alison Hill, told Law News that the ministry had received 1927 application from lawyers for approval under the Legal Services Act 2011.

“We did receive a number of late applications (held up by Christmas post) and applications dated December 31 or earlier that reached the Provider Services team by close of business on Friday, January 6, 2012, were accepted as having met the deadline.

Of the 1927 providers who have applied, 1608 have applied to be lead providers and 221 as supervised providers. Another 98 have applied for a combination of lead provider in some areas of law and supervised in other areas.”

Lawyers wishing to continue to provide legal aid services were all required by the legislation to submit applications for approval to the ministry by the end of last year. The ministry said in a newsletter in mid-2011 that there were approximately 3000 listed legal aid providers holding almost 9000 approvals.

Section 75 of the act states that persons must not provide legal aid services or specified services unless they have been approved by the Secretary of Justice to provide those services and the people comply with any conditions of that approval.

Lawyers were required to submit applications for approval accompanied by specific details of their experience in the areas for which they were seeking approval. Separate details were required for each approval category, such as family,criminal, civil or Treaty of Waitangi.

Section 77 states that the secretary may impose any conditions on providers’ approvals to provide legal aid services. If approval is declined, the secretary is required to provide reasons. Section 77(5) enables the secretary to grant providers temporary approvals to provide one or more legal aid services or specified services. Under section 78, selection committees may be established to assess applications for approval.

The committees must comprise a ministry representative as the chairperson, a lawyer from a group of lawyers nominated by the New Zealand Law Society and any other “suitably qualified people”.

Many lawyers found the application processm extremely time-consuming and the ministry held clinics in Manukau, Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Lower Hutt, Porirua and Wellington to provide assistance to practitioners in completing therequirements.

Ms Hill said that, of the 2718 providers listed to do legal aid work as at December 31, 2011, approximately 500 were not actively engaged in legal aid work.

“While we are now undertaking further analysis of provider coverage geographically and by jurisdiction, it appears that enough providers have applied for approval under the new act to continue to meet legal aid service needs. We are pleased with this result and consider that it reflects the ministry’s efforts toensure that lawyers were well-informed about howto apply and supported to make applications.

Source: "Law News"