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Takeaway_Addict

Pollycat wrote: »

But in the post below you go on (and on) about various types of lawyer (social security, family, prison etc) and then use 'we' and 'our' in your following statements which to me puts you in the 'I am a lawyer' category.

Either that or you have copied and pasted text from someone else (as you have done frequently in your earlier posts).

It's getting increasingly hard to determine whether you are writing something original or just regurgitating something you have read elsewhere.

If you are going to quote someone else, please use the 'quote' function or, better still, just provide the link.



I think your rant-y style of writing is contributing in part to the lack of support you are receiving on this forum.



What on earth are you on about?

MSE 'friends'?
This is a public forum, I'm certainly not 'friends' with anyone on here.
I agree with some people's views sometimes, then maybe on another different topic I may disagree totally with that same poster.
It doesn't make me 'friends' with them if I agree and it doesn't make me an enemy of them if I disagree with them.

And as for saying 'shame' because posters aren't leaping to your defence, then maybe that should tell you that they simply don't agree with your opinions.

Good spot...that is the definition of busted!

wouldbeqaulitymoneysaver

In order for Non non Lawyers like myself to make argue a point then the need to copy and paste is an essential because the trained Professionals can say it better than we ever can.
It does NOT exempt me from having my own angle on things and of commenting.
The above Speech is from Stephen Knafler QC of Garden Court Chambers, is but one example of the speeches made at the MOJ at the #saveukjustice demo. They are all good and worth publishing far and wide.
I do it to appeal to public interest and the public good although at this moment it does not look like it because Lawyers are being demonized by the DM and right wing press because the government wants public 'consent' to privatise it
Trouble is Joe public has not been aware of it.
I have. I have only been a few days on Twitter and a whole world has opened up to me about what is REALLY going on in the
Criminal Justice System, the general Justice System Family Employment and other area, and whole lot of lawyerly things that affect non lawyers like ourselves.

Quote:
Originally Posted by wouldbeqaulitymoneysaver
Because the case would not be handled properly by inexperienced and ill qualified people and I have rights under the Rule of Law.
The niche firms cost less in case time etc.

Do you have proof that your case would not be handled properly? Or are you yet again regurgitating the crap you have read on biased blogs?

I will get back to you KWA hang on in there I want to do proper justice to my response.

Quick post to check in. Thank you to MSE Martin and MSE Admin for still keeping this thread going. Hopefully OP and I can make case for some major sigs.:beer:

Dogger69

wouldbeqaulitymoneysaver wrote: »

Hopefully OP and I can make case for some major sigs.:beer:

I'm sorry, your posts are doing quite the opposite

Yorkie1

At the risk of being associated with WBQMS's constant postings, can I quote Jonny's post.

It sets out the issues clearly and hopefully without missing anything.

BTW, I am not a defence lawyer but the proposed assault on the interests of justice is, simply, staggering.

jonny_p wrote: »

ok...hopefully I can add some information here despite not being a lawyer. Apologies for the length but obviously this is not something that can be covered in 10 lines and I have barely scratched the surface.

Chris Grayling is the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. Despite these lofty titles, he is not a lawyer and therefore has no actual hands-on experience of the workings of the criminal justice system. He has received numerous warnings about manipulation of figures in his various political roles and was involved in the dodgy expenses debacle.

The LC wants to make £220m of savings from the Criminal Legal Aid budget of just under £1Bn (inc. VAT). He wants to achieve this through Price Competitive Tendering. Essentially, providers will need to bid for a guaranteed % of cases at fixed fees. These fees must be at least 17.5% less than current costs. The argument being that "economies of scale" will allow companies to still make a profit.

Very few of the solicitor firms around the country are in a position to bid. This will open the door for multinationals such as G4S, Serco, Tesco, Stobarts and the Co-op to tender their bids. They will in all likelihood, be the main winners in this process and take huge amounts of public money to add to their profits. The Govt think that 1200 of the 1600 solicitor firms will close although it is likely to be more than that.

Ironically, the gov't were totally against PCT when in opposition due to the potential devastating impacts. The (then-shadow) Attorney General said:

"I cannot see that competitive tendering in criminal legal aid makes sense – legal aid contracts do not pay market rates. If firms want to win a competitive tender, the only way they will be able to undercut each other is by steps that could open them up to potential allegations of incompetence.’ He continued: ‘There are ideas creeping into the system that treat legal aid as if it is just about the economic provision of a service. That approach will lead to problems with lowered standards"

There are also lots of comments about the 'cost' of our justice system and how it costs so much more than any other country. This simply is not true as a study was carried out by the EU that concluded that the average spent by a member state was 0.3% of annual GDP. Guess where we stood in the table? Bang on average.
Unfortunately the gov't manipulate figures and don't actually give context by saying we spend more on something than country y. However y then spends more than us on something else. Overall though, we are pretty standard for europe once you include all costs for the justice system.

The government have already attempted PCT recently in the translator service used in courts. This relatively straightforward process has been an absolute shambles. The ministry of justice was investigated by the justice select committee and were found to have misled them about the successes and were deemed to have failed due to not understanding the complexity of the service.

The LC wants to make wholesale sweeping changes to the whole criminal justice system without actually any evidence to back up his ideas. This is huge is relative terms to the translation service. No intention to pilot the scheme and assess the impact, just plod on and hope it works. They MoJ even accept that there is no plan-B if things go wrong. Quite scary really isn't it?


People that are opposed to this include the country's judges, leading academics in the field of law, providers of legal services, the gov'ts own treasury counsel, liberty, homeless charities and members of the justice select committee. Many of these actually have no financial interest in legal aid but have real concerns about the plans because they ACTUALLY understand how the justice system works.

The LC claims that he is willing to listen to alternatives. However, the leader of the Criminal Bar Association, Michael Turner QC, has offered to meet and discuss many times. However the LC refuses to do this and has actually pulled out of media interviews when he found out that Michael Turner would be present. He cannot back up his ideas and therefore does not want to try justify them. He is not interested in making savings, he just wants to privatise the justice system.

Assuming the process goes forwards there are many changes in place.
1) You could be accused of an offence by the state
2) The state will then tell you who is going to defend you
3) Your lawyer will be cheap but have little experience and possibly not even have experience in the relevant area of law
4) The lawyer will actually be on an incentive to obtain a guilty plea
5) Due to reduced fees and the multi-national's focus on profits, extra investigations/expert witnesses are unlikely to be paid for
6) You would not be able to change your lawyer regardless of their performance
7) The multinational will be guaranteed work for three years and will have no incentive to do well for you. The Gov't in their consultation document actually state that they expect service to reduce to 'adequate'
8) If you 'qualify' for legal aid by having a gross household disposable income of less than 37.5K you will still be means tested. Got any savings/bonds/house equity? You'll be using some of that first before they top up your costs with legal aid.
9) If you do not qualify for legal aid you will pay privately (expensive)
10) If you are found not guilty, you will not get your actual costs back. You will get the fee that Eddie Stobart would have received. Found innocent but broken financially in the process.
11) If you plead guilty because your G4S or Serco provided lawyer convinced you that "it would be better for you", you could be driven away in a G4S/Serco van to a prison run by G4S/Serco who receive money from the government for looking after you and any other person their lawyer has 'defended'. No conflicts of interest there then!

George Orwell could not have made it up better!

In the modern day we are told by Gov't that we can choose schools, doctors, hospitals, MPs and the political party that runs the country. Customer choice improves standards because their is genuine competition. However when it comes to your liberty, they want to fob you off with the cheapest lawyer that they have chosen to defend you.

Many people say "why should I pay? I don't break the law" which to some extent is fair enough. But what if you or somebody you know was attacked and defended themselves but still ended up being charged for assault? Or somebody made a false rape allegation against you but were convincing enough for you to be charged...the scenario list could go on. What would you want then? I imagine that you would want good representation from a reputable lawyer. I bet that the first time you meet him/her you don't say to yourself "I do hope this one's cheap".

Following the announcement of these proposals, the Legal Aid Agency have made many in-house improvements and state that they have made ca. £170m savings for the coming year. Despite this, the LC still goes on about wanting to still cut another £220m. This follows on from £350m cuts recently applied to civil legal aid.

Obviously there is massive PR spin at work, for instance the recent release of the legal aid earned by various QCs and Solicitor firms. No mention of the taxes to be repaid by those listed and certainly no mention of how many cases they carried out to earn the fees. It is also poor that the figures include civil lawyers when the current consultation is about criminal legal aid. But being open and honest would not get the public on-side would it? Do you think that Grayling via the Mail will be saying "look at these fat cats multinationals taking £300m each" if he gets his way?


The Gov't accept that the average Legal Aid Barrister earns ca £55K. This is before 20%VAT, Chambers Fees, professional license, petrol to drive around the country, carpark fees etc. Actual salary is likely to be in the order of £30,000 before tax and NI. Finishing in court and then working to the early hours is common to earn the same as a police officer with a few years experience. Hardly fat cats at the trough as the daily mail would like to portray.

Legal aid funded solicitors generally earn 20-30K...again not exactly creaming it in. You never see these numbers released as it would not help the gov't case. Just keep rolling out the same tired cliches and info about the top 10 earners rather than averages.

Nick Clegg recently commented on the issue of changing the numbers of toddlers that a child minder/nursery can look after. He essentially blocked the changes by saying....

"we can only decide on this when we have heard the response of people who frankly know better than any politician...I think it is imperative to be led by the evidence...and not make our minds up finally until we had heard from people"

If only he would apply the same sensible logic to the problems that the coalition's secretary of state is going to cause.

All of these changes can be made at the sole decision of Chris Grayling. No need to have a parliamentary vote as it is covered through secondary legislation which conveniently circumvents what you would probably expect for something this big.

If you think that any of this is wrong and sounds too much like 1984 then please sign the petition. 100K signatures would require an open debate on the issues in parliament.

epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/48628

If you think that something this big should actually be fully discussed and voted on in parliament perhaps you should sign it as well.

hopefully some of you are still reading by now

mjm3346

These fees must be at least 17.5% less than current costs

Not much of a start considering how inflated their fees have become over the years and how much they have screwed out of the taxpayer.
It's about time they moved the legal profession from being a licence to print money to just being an opportunity to earn a living.

ljonski

Lawyers are like bananas - they are yellow , slippery and hang round in bunches.

On the other hand some modicum of Justice is desperately needed in our amoral society.

Therefore I have signed the petition.

wouldbeqaulitymoneysaver

Any Signers post here. All posts appreciated. Every sig makes a difference.

But if you choose to sign secretly that is also ok, the sigs are the only thing that is needed along with attempting to grasp the importance of what is going on Lawyer or not.
I am finding that I am learning tonnes as I proceed to try to do my bit to advance the campaign. I hope you all do too.
Many thanks love and blessings xxx

Valli

Yorkie1 wrote: »

At the risk of being associated with WBQMS's constant postings, can I quote Jonny's post.

It sets out the issues clearly and hopefully without missing anything.

BTW, I am not a defence lawyer but the proposed assault on the interests of justice is, simply, staggering.

:T:T:T:T:T

at last - some sense.

Thank you.

WBQMS - please note!

wouldbeqaulitymoneysaver

mjm3346 wrote: »

Not much of a start considering how inflated their fees have become over the years and how much they have screwed out of the taxpayer.
It's about time they moved the legal profession from being a licence to print money to just being an opportunity to earn a living.

I don't know if I can do the remotest justice to how much both the legal system and Law Firms have been cut cut cut till there is no more to cut.
I wish to refuse the idea that they are fat cat lawyers. The only lawyers who really make money are Commercial Lawyers.
However to provide balance there are high earning Lawyers who earn from Legal aid like Michael Mansfied QC who takes on the most difficult of cases that demand extremely high levels of expertise and mostly wins.
There are firms Chambers and Solicitors who rely on Legal Aid funding that isn't bad because if these firms are allowed to be decimated we all lose.
Public Law is a key specialism where the public can hold the state to account for bad decisions so decison making can be improved saving taxpayers money.
The Govt wishes to make Judicial Review claims difficult to bring by imposing unreasonable unlawaful? barriers.
Self interest is good but it is in the service of the public and for the public good. This is one of the reasons I support it.
Any criticisms I am sure I can also direct to the legal community so hopefully I won't be a starstruck lovesick fan who has no discernment and no critical faculty.

wouldbeqaulitymoneysaver

Dogger69 wrote: »

I'm sorry, your posts are doing quite the opposite

At least you are telling me.:beer:

I quickly compose Posts to get it done, get it on.
Ever since I've been on this Lawyerly thing I have been feeling increasingly exposed as doing radical and profound injustice to myself and my causes because I stumble when it comes to articulating what is going on inside because of what I see. Plus importantly protect my relationships with the legal community so where there are secrets they are safe and do not stray outside to where they shouldn't be.

Lawyers visiting my blogs are making me feel like I am missing out on great opportunities. My MOJ Response got a surprise editing from a Lawyer friend on twitter. the political tone response went out not what should have been a more moderately argued and considered responsee. I believe as a result it is not published along with other non lawyers on a major professional website which is viewed by Practicing Lawyers.
Instead of glory I have shame and regret.
|If the non publishing of my response on this site helps the campaign I am glad. I wish I wasn't so anxious and in mental pain that I didn't compose in haste and repent at leisure.:(:(