CCMS the Legal Aid Agency's (LAA) online system for all applications for civil legal aid is supposed to be made mandatory from 1st April, but the system still seems not up to the job. Officials at the LAA should swallow their pride and admit this and agree to a further delay.     CCMS is designed to process both applications and bills in civil legal aid cases which include family, housing, asylum, judicial review and other areas of law. The LAA had planned to make the use of CCMS compulsory for all civil legal aid applications from October last year, but had been forced to put back this deadline due to problems with the program. Carol Storer, director of LAPG, had publicly threatened to resign if the LAA had not listened to the concerns of legal aid lawyers. The deadline for implementation slipped again from 1st February 2016 to next month.     It seems clear to LAG that the program is now more user friendly than previous versions. Progress has been made in its functionality, but the latest spate of problems seem to be related to the underlying IT infrastructure at the MoJ.     At the beginning of the month CCMS was unavailable over the weekend. Officials at the LAA, so far, have been unable to give an explanation for this failure.  Throughout recent months practitioners have been complaining that CCMS is too slow or, that they have been completely unable to access it. According to some it is quicker to apply on paper for legal aid than to use CCMS- which rather defeats the object of introducing a digital application system. A couple of firms told LAG that they were accessing CCMS outside normal office hours as it was too slow to use at other times.     It is clear then that the system is still not ready, but name me a large government software project which has not had problems and delays? It is to be hoped that the MoJ eventually gets the technology right and CCMS leads to savings in administrative costs- cash which LAG would argue should be spent on assisting more members of the public, rather than disappearing into the Treasury’s coffers.     Provided CCMS works efficiently and third party software supplies can build solutions to integrate it with case management systems in firms this should lead to greater efficiency for practitioners. It’s pointless though to force the issue, the LAA should concentrate on building the confidence of the legal aid providers in CCMS before making it compulsory.     Steve Hynes, Director of LAG.