Filed under: Activism, News | Tags: lawyers, legal aid, new zealand, News, protest
Tauranga’s family law barristers angered by the Government’s slashing of legal aid are planning to take their objections to the streets with a protest march.
Stopwork action could also be part of their bid to highlight their concerns.
Government budget cuts mean lawyers undertaking legal aid work from July 1 will have their hourly rate cut on average by $2 to $3. The lawyers say the rate reduction will deprive society’s most disadvantaged of quality legal advice.
Current legal aid rates range from $105 to $182 an hour which the Legal Services Agency calculates taking into account the lawyer’s level of experience and the nature of the proceedings.
The rate reduction affects lawyers engaged in family law, criminal and civil cases, and comes after the rates were only increased last year following 12 years stuck at the 1996 level.
Senior family law barristers Trish Jones and Liz Jamieson, both members of Beach Legal team in Mount Maunganui, said the reduction was not just about a pay cut, which in itself was unfair and disheartening after lawyers fought for 12 years to achieve a pay increase. But the pair, who each have clocked over 30 years in the legal profession, said the cutback would also impact on the most vulnerable – particularly those who could not afford to pay for
a lawyer but need one in urgent custody proceedings, parenting orders and domestic violence cases.
Ms Jones said people served with protection orders currently had to telephone four or five firms to find a legal-aid lawyer willing to drop everything to take on their case and many lawyers were pulling out of this work because of the current rate of remuneration.
Late last week Tauranga’s family law bar members met to discuss taking action. Chris Forbes, a partner with Tauranga legal firm Bush, Forbes and McLeod, said she and other members were planning an “Access to Justice” protest march.
Ms Forbes said the aim was to send a clear message to the Government that family lawyers and their clients would not simply accept the cuts.
Ms Jones said if all the family lawyers in Tauranga suddenly pulled out of doing legal aid work, people would turn up to court unrepresented.
Tauranga barrister MaryAnn McCarty said the reduction “strikes at the very heart” of every New Zealander’s right to access to justice.
Ms McCarty said if more senior lawyers withdrew from the legal aid pool and juniors coming up the ranks became disenchanted about filling the gaps because of the reduced remuneration rate, the system would start to break down.
“When the legal aid monies run out, which they generally do half way through preparing a case, no lawyer is going to just abandon their client but we have to carry on to see the case to its conclusion regardless.”
Senior Tauranga trial lawyers say they are disappointed the pay decrease has been made even before a pending review by Dame Margaret Bazley has been completed, and without any consultation.
Lawyer Tony Balme said the Government risked driving more senior lawyers away from legal aid work.
“The court system is pretty fragile in Tauranga given that there is only a handful of experienced trial lawyers doing most of our trial work.”
Some MPs have accused defence lawyers of milking the legal aid system by taking payments for hopeless or unnecessary cases, but Mr Balme said the MPs were taking “cheap political shots” and the justice system could not function without people having an experienced defence lawyer to represent them.
Filed under: Media, News | Tags: boycott, lawyers, legal aid, Media, ontario, the globe and mail, toronto
From The Globe & Mail:
Veteran lawyers join legal-aid boycott
By Kirk Makin
A boycott of Ontario’s legal-aid plan by seasoned criminal lawyers doubled overnight, as virtually every experienced defence counsel in Toronto vowed to stop taking serious cases until there is a hike in legal-aid fees.
By late Tuesday, 140 lawyers had signed onto a boycott of future homicide and guns-and-gangs cases in protest of legal-aid rates that have steadily fallen further behind the cost of living, said Frank Addario, president of the Criminal Lawyers Association.
“Homicide and gun-and-gangs are obviously the most high-profile examples of how the criminal justice system does or doesn’t work,” Mr. Addario said. “We wanted to pull back the curtain on those cases because we have been holding it in place and hiding the problem for the government for two decades.”
Marlys Edwardh, a prominent Toronto defence lawyer, said the boycott “will underscore, in the strongest possible way, that there is a need to bring senior, experienced people back into the complex cases. I think this is a very loud statement.”
However, Ontario Attorney-General Chris Bentley warned in an interview that the boycott “could very well end up being counterproductive.”
He refused to elaborate, but said his government cannot be expected to rapidly resolve a problem that was created by previous governments. “We have made some progress over the past five years with a 15-per-cent increase in the fees, but the 15 years before were years of cuts,” Mr. Bentley said.
Veteran lawyers who typically charge $300 to $500 an hour to private clients make $98 an hour for a legal-aid case, Mr. Addario said, which results in them ceding the field to inexperienced young lawyers. “The cost is runaway trials, unreliable verdicts that lead to overturned cases, and a terrible expenditure of police and prosecution and judicial resources,” he said.
Mr. Addario said that the justice system must resign itself to sprawling trials that are conducted by fledgling lawyers who lack the experience to make concessions and focus on key legal issues. “It’s no slur on our younger members to say that they are being thrown onto cases often because there is no one else to take them,” Mr. Addario said.
“The government knows the program is discredited in the legal community,” he added. “The service providers they have lost in the last decade will not return if it maintains the status quo. So, it’s not as if this is going to eliminate an excellent program that serves the indigent. It’s already a mess.”
Ms. Edwardh said wrongful convictions may result from the growing imbalance between the resources available to the Crown and the defence.
“I see this as the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” she said. “We have not had meaningful legal-aid reform. I think there are voices from the Attorney-General’s office that perceive adequately funding the defence as being part of a soft-on-crime agenda. This is misconceived and it’s misguided, but there is no other explanation.”
The boycott is the most dramatic action the defence bar has taken in the past decade. It comes after three major reports into legal aid and systemic problems in the court system concluded that legal-aid rates must rise in order to attract senior lawyers back to the program.
Ms. Edwardh said that besides barely covering the cost of law-office overheads, legal aid pays defence expert witnesses half of what they can receive if they are retained by the Crown.
“That is a very skewed and dangerous lack of balance,” she said. “I have absolutely no doubt that, when the defence bar is unable to access the experts they need, what’s at stake are wrongful convictions.”
Each province administers its own legal-aid system, however, underfunding is so widespread that the Canadian Bar Association launched litigation a couple of years ago in several regions in order to force adequate financing.
Mr. Addario said that in 2007-2008, Legal Aid Ontario’s total budgeted revenue was $350-million.
