Guiding you through an increasingly complex system with the help of a national expert in civil legal aid
Guiding you through the complexity of today's legal aid
Costs recovery is an integral part of the value chain for access to justice, a term much undervalued due to the need to refer to it so frequently.
The complexity of civil legal aid costs has increased in recent years with new procedures and legislation set against tighter controls. We can provide expertise, experience and up to date knowledge in the ever changing world of legal aid costs to help you reduce rejections, improve your KPIs, remain viable, and remain able to support your clients. We go beyond simply drawing bills and can provide you with a full end to end service to make securing final payment of your costs as easy and quick as possible.
The services we can provide in this area include:
High Cost Case Plans
Care Case Fee Scheme Plans and Claims (Events)
Bills of costs for detailed assessment (with complimentary Request for detailed assessment)
Family and non-family civil certificate claims, both online and paper based (e.g. Claim 1/1As)
Appealing decisions and challenging rejections
Post bill service for detailed assessed claims
All bills and claims come with a pre-prepared bundle of papers for submission for assessment.
Benefit from access to a national expert
Our owner, Paul Seddon, is one of the foremost experts in civil legal aid costs in England and Wales. He quite literally wrote the book on it as author of that section in the Legal Aid Handbook (a publication referred to in turn as ‘the legal aid bible’). He sits on the advisory committee of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group (LAPG), is a former chair of the Association of Costs Lawyers (ACL) Legal Aid Group, and collaborates directly with the Legal Aid Agency on new procedures for legal aid costs.
He is well known for his wealth of experience and expertise and is regularly consulted on complex, novel and challenging issues that arise. He also develops and delivers training and guidance on legal aid costs for solicitors, barristers and other costs professionals and is accredited to provide CPD training on costs; he helped develop the legal aid section of the course that all new Costs Lawyers must sit to obtain regulated status under the Legal Services Act, and authored the Bar Council’s guide on claiming enhancements for barristers’ work.
CCMS
The Client and Cost Management System (CCMS) is the Legal Aid Agency’s new system to process all civil certificated work online.
Paul Seddon is the author of the ACL's Report on CCMS, which highlighted the challenges brought about by the new system.
We use advanced software in order to offer the much coveted ‘bulk/claim upload’ service for CCMS to cut out many of the current hurdles the system presents. Rather than being reliant on CCMS, we prepare our claims externally on our own software, and provide additional reports that contain the same detail as paper claims in readiness for requests from the LAA for further information on the costs claimed.
“Paul regularly raises complex costs points with the Legal Aid Agency as well as with other bodies and we are always amazed at his encyclopaedic knowledge of costs.”
“Having a thorough knowledge of the Legal Aid scheme, statute and case law, he deals with our Legal Aid bills as well as our inter-partes costs and is just as competent with them.”