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 aid applicants in England and Wales dating back to 2010 had been accessed and downloaded in a significant cyber-attack.
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.
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.
“Lots of barristers and solicitors are saying to us: this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. We wouldn’t be surprised that by the time things are eventually fixed, there will be fewer [legal aid] providers because people just can’t take the stress any more,” he said.
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.
One barrister working primarily on legal aid cases, who asked not to be named, said they were offered only £9.50 a week under the contingency scheme.
“Its obviously really laughable and I know a lot of colleagues were offered a very low rate,” they said. “I am still doing legal aid work, but financially I am not in a good position. I’ve had to think about other forms of income, rely more on my partner, and I’m just not able to afford certain things that I would otherwise.
“It’s particularly had a really massive impact on barristers from working-class backgrounds.”
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.
“They are based on a guesstimate, so if we underclaim or overclaim, we’ll be in some difficulty,” she said. “We’re literally flying blind in an area where there’s no margin to play with. So from a business perspective, it’s deeply dangerous.”
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. “The bottom-line impact is that we can look after fewer clients because our processing times for everything are longer,” she said. “We now have to keep a manual note of everything; we’ve gone back to paper which we’re later going to have to input.
“We’ve got no management information, we’ve got no control over our cashflow, and everyone at the frontline is beleaguered and exhausted because their administrative hours have doubled and they’re able to help less people.”
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She also said the hack had badly damaged trust with vulnerable clients. “The people who are at most risk and who need confidentiality like nobody else, we’re telling them, well, we’ve been putting your stuff into an unsafe system,” she said. “It’s a major erosion of trust.”
There have long been concerns about legal aid “deserts” 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.
“We’re constantly forced to turn away work because we just don’t have capacity to, and that was happening even before the hack just because of the limited funding of legal aid,” said Abbi Hart, the co-chair of Young Legal Aid Lawyers. “This is just going to make it worse. The system was in a pretty bad way beforehand, now it’s even more concerning.”
A Legal Aid Agency spokesperson said: “We 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.
“A contingency system is in place and barristers and solicitors can use our simple escalation process if they feel the average pay figure is inaccurate.”
