Pro bono: Good enough?

National Pro Bono Week was marked by the Solicitors Journal with a supplement ‘Pro bono: Good enough?’ containing articles by the great and the good in the world of pro bono. It is downloadable at www.solicitorsjournal.com/justicegap . The mantra, as ever, was ‘it is an adjunct to, not a substitute for, legal aid’ which takes us back to 1949 when the Labour government gave the legal and medical professions the alternatives of either being nationalised, or of voluntarily coming up with proposals for providing their services free to those who could not afford to pay for them. The medical profession came up with nothing, and they got the National Health Service. The legal profession avoided the creation of a National Legal Service by proposing the Legal Aid Scheme funded by a 10% reduction in lawyers’ fees to those clients who qualified for legal aid, subject to contributions, which amounted to 80% of the population. Prior to that a key concept in the running of a solicitors’ practice had been ‘cross-subsidisation’ – whereby the more profitable work (mainly probate and conveyancing) subsidised the less profitable or unprofitable work (such as crime and litigation), with work being done pro bono for deserving clients who could not afford to pay anything. It was contemplated that the new Legal Aid Scheme would embrace this philosophy and that all firms of solicitors would offer legal aid as a method of funding to those who qualified for it. It went wrong at both ends of the spectrum. It was not obligatory for firms of solicitors to undertake legal aid work, and not all of them did. Over the years, the number of firms not accepting legal aid work, and indeed, not now being allowed to accept it because they have neither a public funding contract or a franchise, has increased from a trickle to a flood.