In order for a practice to make money out of legal aid, where the average hourly charging rates are probably somewhere between £40–£60, it is no longer viable for this work to be done by partners and experienced solicitors. The bigger players in the legal aid field all employ large numbers of (often quite young) paralegals, interns and would-be trainees doing work experience (sometimes for no salary).

The real difficulty with legal aid cases is that you need a degree of volume to make a profit; for example, 1,000 or 1,500 new files a year, and the files will often be quite small. A colleague of mine in a City firm was surprised that my average bill was below £1,000, remarking that his average bill was closer to £10,000.

So, we are seeing a dumbing down of this half of the profession. Whereas ten years ago I had six, bulging filing cabinets full of legal aid files and I was seeing six clients a day, due to the cuts I rarely see a legally aided client now. I delegate this work to others in the office, which in my case happens to be more junior solicitors. But can a more junior solicitor, of say two years’ post-qualification experience, really give as good a service to the client as a 30-year-qualified partner? I suspect not, and no matter how good the supervision the result is never going to be the same.

The sadness is that the message is beginning to spread. Junior solicitors want out as soon as they qualify. I had an excellent trainee, who skipped off as soon as he could to be an in-house solicitor with an oil company; another (who I tried very hard to keep) went off after two years with me to a shipping firm. Both employers were prepared to pay a newly qualified salary of double what I was able to pay.

Where will the next generation of legal aid lawyers come from? Will they just be solicitors who cannot get a job elsewhere, perhaps because they have a poor degree or a less than excellent academic record? Will they be just getting a training contract in legal aid, and then jetting off into a commercial practice? The quality offered by legal aid lawyers in the future is bound to diminish. This will be felt by the client, and it will lead to a second-class service.

I had hoped that a client in reception would never ask to see a ‘poor man’s lawyer’, but that is what happened yesterday. My receptionist said that the client’s query was out of scope and the client said: ‘OK, I’ll go to the poor man’s lawyer’. How sad that a service that was to die for and a shining light to the rest of the world is now dying a slow and painful death by a thousand cuts.

Individuals, advisers, organisations and practitioners are invited to submit their accounts of the impact of the LASPO Act, particularly on people who are socially, economically or otherwise disadvantaged, for publication in this column. Submissions of up to 500 words will be published in full and, on request, anonymised. E-mail: vwilliams@lag.org.uk using the message title ‘Legal aid cuts impact statement’.