The sustainability of legal aid services delivered by private practitioners is under threat, with lawyers increasingly forced to choose between serving vulnerable clients and keeping their businesses afloat.
More than 70 per cent of approved legal aid matters are handled by private practitioners, yet they are being paid a third of the rate they would normally charge in private practice.
The Queensland Law Society is raising urgent concerns about the issue, calling for the Standing Council of Attorneys-General (SCAG) to address the crisis facing legal aid funding.
Queensland Law Society President Genevieve Dee said lawyers take on legal aid work to help vulnerable members of the community, noting many of these practitioners are small business owners, working as sole traders or in small firms, often in regional and remote areas.
"Like any small business, these practitioners face overheads such as rent and utilities and are also struggling with increased cost of living pressures. While access to justice is a core value for lawyers, the current pay scale is so low that many will be forced to opt out of providing legal aid or have already done so,” she said.
“Their ability to provide legal aid services to the most vulnerable people in our state, from family law to farm debt mediation, is under threat unless something is urgently done to address the low rate of pay for this work."
Toowoomba-based family law specialist and practice director Sarah-Jane MacDonald of MacDonald Law said she had seen first-hand the pressures low legal aid pay rates had put on practitioners.
“Lawyers are being asked to deliver complex legal services for a fraction of the cost, and that simply won’t be sustainable for many over the long run,” she said.
“In many regional and remote areas, there are no in-house Legal Aid Queensland lawyers at all, which means private practitioners like us are solely responsible for delivering these services.
“We’re not just doing the legal work, we’re also hiring, training and trying to retain competent staff, which is incredibly difficult in regional areas. The current rate of pay makes it even harder, because we simply can’t compete with the salaries or conditions offered by government or city-based roles.
“Legal aid funding is a fundamental access to justice issue. Without it, many people simply won’t be able to access legal representation.”
Legal aid funding is a shared responsibility between the Commonwealth, states and territories, and should be treated as a national priority.
Ahead of the last state election, QLS called on all parties to increase the rates paid for grants of legal aid to private practitioners so that they are set at the same level as provided in the relevant court scales.
The Law Council of Australia (LCA) has also warned that the current fee structure is driving lawyers away from legal aid work, while a recent survey of practitioners undertaken by the University of New South Wales Social Policy Centre found one in five practitioners are planning to reduce or stop legal aid work altogether over the next five years, while 11 per cent were planning to quit in the next 12 months.
