Lived Experience of the Law: Legal representation and legal aid
Earlier this year, Revolving Doors hosted two policy workshops for our flagship research project, Lived Experience of the Law, in partnership with Birkbeck’s Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research.
The project, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, sets out to develop an understanding of people’s experiences of criminal and family court proceedings, and to advocate for reforms to enhance access to justice and improve experiences of legal processes.
Policy workshops are a key element of the project, bringing together legal professionals, people with lived experience of the law and the charities who support them, policy professionals, and government stakeholders to discuss findings and deliberate on recommendations that could be feasibly implemented. You can find out more about our first policy workshop, held during the pilot phase of this project, here.
The theme of our third policy workshop focused on people’s experiences of legal representation in the criminal courts, with a specific focus on legal aid. In this blog, we will outline key reflections and recommendations, including a live illustration that captured discussions, and outline our next steps.
Key findings around experiences of legal representation
The majority of people that we have interviewed so far have depended on legal aid to fund their representation. The wider context here is substantial cuts to legal aid funding, following the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. These cuts have led to an under-resourced and overstretched system, and in turn, people feeling that their access to justice has been impacted.
- Publicly-funded legal representation was often viewed as being less vigorous and supportive than if someone had the money to pay for representation. This contributed to the view that access to justice is influenced by your income and resources.
- People felt let down by an overstretched and underfunded system, leading to representation feeling rushed, impersonal, and inadequate.
- Where people did have good relationships with their legal representatives, their representation was sometimes changed at incredibly short notice on the day of hearings, leading to people feeling nervous and destabilised.
- Some felt that they were pressurised to plead guilty, with the perception that this was requested to save time.
Nevertheless, participants were aware of the pressure that legal aid representatives were under, and some reflected very positive experiences of their legal aid representative going ‘above and beyond’ for them.
We were pleased to be joined at the workshop by two criminal law barristers, a defence solicitor, two representatives from the Ministry of Justice’s Legal Aid Strategy team, one of our research participants, and a lived experience member of our project advisory board.
The workshop was facilitated by two peer researchers, both of whom have lived experience of legal representation in the criminal courts. They asked questions of all participants and contextualised feedback with their own experiences.
Recommendations from the workshop:
The key questions we posed to the group were: how we can increase people’s confidence in and relationship with their lawyer? What should people expect from their legal aid representative? Who should be involved in implementing change?
Recommendations included:
- Increasing the time legal representatives have for conferences with their clients, and training to improve lawyers’ conference skills. This would help to ensure clients feel heard and can understand the advice they are being given, helping to build greater trust.
- Working with the Bar Standards Board to explore lived experience involvement in barrister training.
- Ensuring that there is always an employee in a solicitor’s office to meaningfully answer clients’ questions in a timely manner.
- Recognising that lawyer/client contact is increasingly happening online, but identifying where in-person contact would be better so that it can be targeted/prioritised.
- Developing clarity about what people can expect from their legal representative.
“As always, I like to try and make changes from within, and loved that we have a mix of different walks of life all striving to make positive changes. The workshops obviously help us discuss things as a collective. My main goal and what I hope to achieve from the things we do is to have an impact and to change things for the better of others. Without us all working as one, then these things would not be made possible, the workshops obviously help in achieving this goal through positive discussions.”
Pottsy, a peer researcher and one of the facilitators of this workshop
This illustration, that was done live during the workshop, demonstrates the in-depth and considered discussions that were had.
We look forward to working with attendees to ensure that the recommendations outlined can be actioned in a timely and practical manner.
We are continuing to interview participants for this project, and will hold further policy workshops based on findings. These will maintain the dialogue with stakeholders from legal, policy, voluntary sector and lived experience backgrounds in order to influence change and ensure a fairer, more accessible justice system.
Watch this space for more updates from us.
