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LAA climbs down over digital billing system
After months of insisting that its much-criticised Client and Cost Management System (CCMS) would be made compulsory for all firms from October 2015, the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) has backed down and announced a four-month delay in its implementation. The agency says the delay is to allow users more time to prepare, and ‘for improvements to be embedded before mandation’.
Critics of the system included practitioners who were at the forefront of working with the LAA to improve CCMS. In recent months, they had become increasingly vocal about its apparent determination to press ahead with a system that users said was still ‘fundamentally flawed’.
Last month, Legal Action (see left) reported that Carol Storer, director of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group (LAPG), had told the agency she would have no choice but to resign if the profession’s concerns continued to fall on deaf ears. LAPG had previously warned that unless fundamental problems with the system were resolved before it is made mandatory, it would cause a ‘meltdown of the legal aid system and chaos for clients’. The extra time the system takes, compared with billing manually, would send some firms over the edge into bankruptcy, it said. Management consultant Vicky Ling described it as ‘a car crash waiting to happen’; solicitor Russell Conway, whose firm is using CCMS for 80 per cent of its billings, said: ‘We are engaging with it, so we know how awful it is.’
The LAA has now put back the deadline to 1 February 2016 for all new civil casework to use the system.
Storer told Legal Action she welcomes LAA’s acknowledgement that improvements are needed: ‘We are grateful to the agency for listening to our concerns and look forward to working with them to ensure it really is fit for purpose before being made mandatory for all firms.’