Ministers pledged yesterday to take an axe to the compensation culture and slash lawyers’ multi-million-pound earnings.
State legal aid will no longer pay for claims against hospitals and doctors or schools and colleges, over immigration or welfare benefit disputes or for divorce lawyers, said Justice Secretary Ken Clarke.
Unprecedented reforms to the £2.1billion-a-year legal aid system will mean that more than half a million court cases annually will no longer be funded by taxpayers. The guiding principle will be that it is available only for civil cases when ‘life or liberty’ is at stake. This will include allegations of domestic violence, child abduction or forced marriage.
Much of the price of reining in legal aid spending will fall on the legal profession, which will see fees to solicitors and barristers cut by more than £400million a year over the next decade. The Justice Secretary told MPs: ‘Legal aid has expanded so much that it is now one of the most expensive in the world, costing the public purse more than £2billion a year. 'It is now available for a very wide range of issues, including some which do not require any legal expertise to resolve.
It cannot be right that the taxpayer is footing the bill for cases which would never have even reached the courtroom door were it not for the fact that somebody else was paying.’
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
As to the subject line, the rumors of my death have, apparently, been greatly exaggerated.
As to the OP, don't you have any sort of contingent-fee system in Aus for liability matters? Don't divorcing parties retain and pay for their own attorneys? It seems odd to me that such a broad range of legal services would be available through legal aid. Here, legal aid is generally a program only for lthe poor and is only available for a limited number of matters -- virtually none of which are "ordinary" civil liability claims (it's used mostly for domestic violence/custody, housing/eviction issues and disability services). It is funded in substantial part by the interest generated on lawyers' trust accounts (IOLTA), which is turned over to the legal services program. (Although with the reduction in interest rates over the last few years the amount generated by IOLTA has dropped considerably.)
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
