External Pressures

In identifying the importance of consistency and time, lawyers in these interviews tended to do so in juxtaposition with the reality they perceived: that external pres­sures restricted their ability to achieve such standards.

It's very pressurised, because often you are seeing a number ofpeople in a morning so you can't waste any time. For example, you can't waste any time on niceties with the client; just straight in the room, you've got to get the client focused and tell them what you've got and deal with all these issues. You feel sometimes like you're a machine when you've got three or four of these people; it's quite disheartening. It's not a very pleasant way of work­ing. There is human contact but there's not as much of it because we're all having to do more and more cases in less and less time. So there isn't time to get a real knowledge of somebody and really understand what makes them tick. It's very fast - in/out - you can't do the job properly, or as well as you used to be able to do, because you can't take the time and the trouble and the care. It's just rush, rush, rush, rush.

(Norma, solicitor, Radford Hope, INT)

The quantity and the quality of contact has diminished and part of the reason for that is that there is so much pressure on solicitors now to deal with a case on the day... doing a high volume of cases on any given day and that limits the time available for each indi­vidual case.

(Leo, senior partner, Radcliffe and Musk, INT)

It's not like it used to be. You can't enjoy it as much; everything is just so quick and basic. It's like someone is pressing fast-forward on the video recorder sometimes.

(Nadine, partner, Swining MacSage, INT)

Lawyers identified two sources of this pressure. The primary concern in all firms was with legal aid funding, with 30 out of the 35 interviewees talking of the negative effect this had on their work. Lawyers of every variety felt this apprehension, as vis­ible from these examples:

Legal aid is going to become a third rate service... The client will have to wait, they're going to have to be used to making appointments at courts. You know, anyone who hires a solicitor privately, can be assured of when they want to see the solicitor they generally can, the appointment will be kept, the solicitor will have reviewed all the papers by then, they will get some sort of personal service and likely to get the same lawyer all through all the hearings, if they want that. Legal aid clients are going to get whoever is available, who won't have time to give a personal service because it just won't be feasible to do it because the only way to operate legal aid is going to be by volume it seems to me. There's a point where you can make efficiencies and it doesn't affect the quality because, actually, it drives out the inefficiencies. But there comes a point when it downgrades the service. And that's where we're going.

(Dennis, solicitor, freelance, INT)

There's always pressure with the Legal Services Commission cutting down finances. They are bound to have an effect because when you deal with the longer jobs in custody, you get your fixed fee of £200, then nothing until you've gone over £600 or so; you lose all that money before the £600 or so. It comes down to business, at the end of the day; the longer you're in the police station, the less money you make... so they encourage you to do things quickly whenever possible.

There are situations where a lot of solicitors, and this does not include our firm, I hasten to add [laughs], but there are a lot of solicitors firms who will say that, ‘we don't get paid for sending a caseworker to court, therefore we are not going to send a caseworker into court'.

(Josie, barrister, SwiningMacSage, INT)

In addition to legal aid, the interviews saw 24 out of 31 solicitors problematise the drive for efficiency within the Magistrates' Court, known as ‘Criminal Justice: Simple, Speedy, Summary' (see Department for Constitutional Affairs, 2006b). This scheme sought to reduce the time between charge and disposal, cutting the number of hearings and facilitating early guilty pleas. This concerned lawyers in both Radical and Sausage Factory firms, as seen in the following:

With CJSSS [Criminal Justice: Simple, Speedy, Summary] there's terrible pressure at court. Sometimes you can do things quickly at court, sometimes you have clients that you see regularly, you represented them last week, it's a straightforward guilty plea and you can work at top speed. But, if you're pleading not guilty, you cannot be expected to pre­pare in five minutes and we are being forced into situations which are not in anybody's interests... Moves towards efficiency don't always result in more efficiency - they might result in a bit more speed, but it's not justice.

(Donna, solicitor, Radcliffe and Musk, INT)

I see CJSSS [Criminal Justice: Simple, Speedy, Summary] as a measure to get cases through the system more quickly and save costs generally in the whole system. The Labour Government appears to be ideologically opposed to what they perceive as a com­plicated, expensive, burdensome legal system. They want to try and slim it all down, make it less expensive, make it more immediate. I think there will be more miscarriages ofjus- tice, it isn't possible to say how many but I think there will be more as a result of pressures to move cases through quickly.

(Thomas, partner, Swining MacSage, INT)

Combined, many lawyers presented a bleak trend regarding contact and access. However, this was a situation that most also claimed to resist.