The impact of cuts in legal aid funding of private family law cases

Abstract

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Online Courts: Re-Assessing Inequality in the ‘Remote’ Courtroom

“…Therefore, if lay clients are held to the same standards of etiquette and behaviour despite the more limited assistance from representatives, the online system leaves them at a comparative disadvantage. In combination with the already reduced capacity of representatives to assist their clients owing to the reductions in legal aid (Sommerlad, 2001;Welsh, 2017;Gibbs and Ratcliffe, 2019;Wong and Cain, 2019;Campbell, 2020), the online system potentially exacerbates rather than ameliorates the impact of the socioeconomic disparity between processionals and lay clients, to the detriment of the latter.…”

Lay Advisers in Family law Settings: The Role and Quality of Advice Provided on Social media

“…gaps in the funding of initial preparatory stages, during which parties would benefit from legal advice but need to wait for the funding to become available). 6 The stark reduction in numbers of legal aid clients has had a devastating impact on the legal aid advice sector: some firms went bankrupt and some shifted their focus towards mediation or another area of law (Barlow et al, 2017; Organ and Sigafoos 2017; Wong and Cain 2019), reducing thus the availability of legal advice in private family law. As a result, the legal profession started to offer unbundled services, allowing clients to decide which aspects of legal proceedings they need legal support with and what could be managed on the DIY basis (Maclean and Eekelaar 2019).…”