Lawyer Monthly - December 2021 Edition

16 DEC 2021 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM repeating it; we as lawyers need to make the case for why it really, really matters. Not just the straightforward principle case, but the economic case too: the amount of court time that is wasted. Judges will tell you this; even good research from the Department of Justice will tell you this now, as we do now have a slightly more on-side chancellor in the form of Dominic Raab, or so it seems to me. The reality is that where people do not have access to law, it is uneconomic, it is unfair, and it is an affront to our basic principles of having access to justice. Looking at statistics, it is rather damning. The UK is now ranked 79th in the world in terms of accessibility and affordability of civil justice as of 2020. Specifically, around six million adults in the UK face a situation in which they have a need to address a particular legal dispute and are unable to do so. That is a really interesting statistic. I used tow prosecute cases of financial corruption – we were obsessed by those statistics of “how corrupt you are”, which really depended on the external criteria that they applied over the government. Imagine if we sat here as a community and said that, when it came to being the cleanest government, we ranked 79th in the world. That would be a matter of national scandal. To go back to what you touched on earlier, you said that lawyers make poor advocates for legal aid, or they do not they have the necessary skills or drive to push for it harder. How do you feel things could be improved in this area? That is a good question. I do not think they are poor advocates for legal aid, and forgive me if I put it that way. I think lawyers are poor advocates for being