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LAG moves offices
After over 30 years in offices in Pentonville Road, north London, LAG has moved to new premises at Universal House in Wentworth Street, east London. The main reason for moving was that an opportunity arose to share premises with Lasa, a social welfare law and technology charity, and to form what both organisations are rather grandly calling a ‘strategic partnership’ for the benefit of the legal and advice sector. Lasa will be well known to many Legal Action readers for its rightsnet advice support service, which provides expert updates on welfare benefits law, as well as covering other areas of social welfare law. Lasa also has a good reputation for its innovative work on the use of IT to support advice and information services.
The two charities complement each other well, as one of LAG’s great strengths is in traditional, paper-based publishing. Despite the cutbacks in legal aid and other public funding that have hit firms, chambers and not for profit advice centres, we continue to generate most of our income from our publications, ie, LAG books, Legal Action and Community Care Law Reports. We now have electronic versions of our books and of Legal Action, which our customers view as providing a useful, additional way of accessing information. However, it is important to emphasise that most of our customers still prefer the paper versions of our publications. So, while LAG views the partnership with Lasa as a great opportunity to draw on its expertise in developing new electronic-based services, we are not going to abandon the paper versions of our books, magazine or law reports.
We believe that our strategic partnership with Lasa will lead to a commercially sound future for both organisations. This is important as LAG has never been reliant on government grants to sustain our work. Our publications and training courses, as well as disseminating knowledge about the law, legal aid and legal services, provide an income which ensures LAG’s independence to say what we believe is right for the people who rely on legal and advice services. This is now more important than ever given the low ebb which access to justice policy has reached under the coalition government.