Law: A case for celebration

The Legal Action Group has achieved a lot in 25 years. But it still faces an uphill task. By Patricia Wynn Davies

On 18 November, 1971, an unexpectedly large number of people turned up to a meeting at the offices of Andrew Phillips, a solicitor, in Smithfield, central London. "The attendance of over 70 people very much exceeded what had been anticipated and there were unfortunately some who could not even get inside the meeting," a report of the meeting observed in endearingly polite terms.

Nothing could have prepared what we would now term a packed meeting for the impact of the organisation that grew out of the gathering - the Legal Action Group (LAG), which is celebrating its 25th birthday this year.

A glance through the minutes of that inaugural meeting shows the scale of the task facing this dedicated band - the need for an effective information service for a burgeoning body of specialist lawyers whose work was geared to helping disadvantaged people, the need to "evangelise" a complacent legal profession that concentrated on easier, better paid, ways of earning its living, the need for a rethink in legal education, which was failing to examine the role of law in society, and the need for more neighbourhood law centres.

Twenty-five years on, LAG has more than 800 members, an annual turnover approaching pounds 1m, a monthly magazine, an array of training courses and books, an Internet site, an electronic international legal services network and, last but not least, a voice that is heard in Whitehall and Chancery Lane. There is little doubt that the group lived up to those initial aims.

The first law centre staffed with salaried lawyers had been launched in the run-down end of Notting Hill, west London, in 1970. By 1973, a wave of new centres had been established. Spotlighting the failings of the Law Society, the solicitors' professional body, LAG began offering post-qualification training for social welfare and other legal aid lawyers, and campaigning for extended legal rights for people on the poverty line. LAG's increasingly influential role as a pressure group coincided with the return of a Labour government. Another founder member, the solicitor Cyril Glasser, became an adviser to Lord Elwyn Jones, the Lord Chancellor. In the early Eighties, LAG's then-director, Ole Hansen, revealed the Law Society's dire failure to investigate complaints against its members, leading to the setting-up of the first arms-length complaints system.

Long before the solicitors' establishment got around to considering the rights of the consumer, LAG was advocating advertising to enable clients to be matched to experts, the abolition of scale fees in conveyancing, and rights for solicitors to act as advocates in the courts. Roger Smith, who took over as director in 1986, says: "The guiding principle is that the profession must be able to justify its privileges and position."

The abolition of the rank of QC, which helps to create an artificially inflated market for senior barristers, some of whose generous incomes are further boosted by the taxpayer through legal aid, is another of Smith's target issues.

By the early Nineties, by now in concert with the Law Society and the Bar, LAG was campaigning ceaselessly against the former Lord Chancellor Lord Mackay's dramatic cuts in eligibility for legal aid and has helped to stave off, at least in the shorter term, the imposition of cash limits on the pounds 1.6bn budget. There has been campaigning in the criminal field too, against the weakening of the right of silence and suggested administrative reforms that might undermine the requirement to prove a case beyond reasonable doubt.

None of this means that LAG has remained impervious to new ideas. It has accepted the case for exploring different ways of providing funding for legal services, such as conditional fees and insurance in appropriate cases and block contracting of legal aid work with specialist firms. But it is equally alive to the potential drawbacks. The cutbacks of legal aid in recent years have spawned a steady increase in litigants-in-person before the courts, which judges are finding increasingly worrying.

Smith and Vicki Chapman, LAG's head of policy, are limbering up for the latest head-to-head with the new Labour Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, in the autumn, when the review of legal aid and civil justice by former Treasury mandarin Sir Peter Middleton is due to be completed.

Smith and Chapman's first clash with Irvine, over a massive increase in court fees, left a nasty taste in the mouth. LAG had briefed peers before last month's Lords debate on the issue, putting the case for automatic remission of the increased fees for people on a range of means-tested benefits. Lord Irvine, a wealthy former QC, in effect subverted the entire debate by launching an attack on "fat-cat lawyers railing against the inequity of court fees". Irvine also embarked on a doughty rebuttal of the idea of sweeping away court fees altogether, a suggestion that had never been raised by anyone until he did. Chapman, formerly a solicitor with the Child Poverty Action Group, was appalled by the political sleight of hand. The move ensured that the issue of people being too afraid to bring or defend, say, a housing claim because of uncertainty over whether the fee could be recovered went barely reported in the media. "By all means cut the pay of fat-cat QCs on legal aid; the Government could do that whenever it wanted," says Smith, another former Child Poverty Action Group solicitor. "That does not alter the fact that excessively high court fees deter people whose cases do not qualify for legal aid from seeking justice."

The episode could be symptomatic of the task LAG faces in the future. Says Smith: "Something quite dramatic is going to have to happen to civil justice and legal aid. At one time, the rich bought lawyers, the poor had legal aid. Now we need to bring down unit price while expanding scope. But it will be difficult to turn the ship of state in a different direction. After Middleton there will be a window of opportunity to influence the Labour government. We must be ready to seize it"n