Dame Margaret Bazley

Wellington, Nov 27 NZPA - Recommendations from Dame Margaret Bazley's review of the legal aid system.

* Disestablish The Legal Services Agency as a Crown entity and give its functions moved into the Ministry of Justice;

* Ensure independent decisions on who gets legal aid by appointing a statutory officer within the Justice Ministry;

* Give the ministry chief executive responsibility for legal aid, including overseeing the accreditation system for legal aid lawyers, monitoring standards and setting up processes to remove poorly performing lawyers. Another responsibility would be to ensure the legal aid system linked into the wider social services network of government agencies.

* Set up the Legal Aid Review Panel as a tribunal and move its administration to the tribunals division of the ministry.

* Give the tribunal a focus on access to justice and spending. Head it with a non-lawyer to help change this focus.

* Ensure aid is available equally across the country, taking into account geographical, social, cultural, and economic factors.

* Develop simple and clear information for legal aid recipients specifically stating that people on legal aid do not have to pay their lawyers any money and providing it in commonly spoken languages.

* The ministry to consider hiring people to help people at court and refer people to social services.

* Ministry and agency to consider ways of ensuring defendants understood what happened in the court, conditions and when they need to reappear.

* Extend social services into the courts to reduce the social deprivation of court users and their families and whanau.

* Extend Work and Income case management system into courts.

* Extend this system to provide wrap-around services to young, first time offenders, to reduce reoffending.

* Require community law centres to improve links with social services if they want to continue to get funding.

* Have a funding review for community law centres focusing on early resolution and standardising service nationally with quality standards set.

* Extend contracts with existing social services to provide wrap-around support to families of offenders, including assisting children back to school.

* Education and Justice ministries to look at possibility of temporary childcare for court users.

* Focus on reducing barriers to getting aid.

* Create a better focus on legal needs for Maori and Pacific peoples and barriers they face.

* Change the duty solicitor scheme so defendants can meet days before their first appearance to better prepare.

* Simplify the legal aid application form so clerical staff, not lawyers, can fill them out.

* Set up a case management system for repeat clients who sack lawyers or cause lawyers to quit and assign lawyers rather than allowing choice.

* Urgently set up a new accreditation system to ensure incompetent and/or corrupt lawyers are excluded from the legal aid system.

* Allow only accredited lawyers to provide legal aid services and for those lawyers to meet standards.

* Encourage lawyers to work together to ensure they get training, supervision, mentoring, support, and feedback on their performance in providing legal aid services.

* Affiliation with a group of lawyers should be a condition of accreditation for all lawyers, except the designated group of senior aid lawyers.

* Require all lawyers to have premises from which they operate.

* Put a three-year time limit on accreditation and have a panel decide renewals.

* Improve monitoring to better detect fraud and over-claiming; and to provide incentives for lawyers to provide quality, good value services.

* Implement a proposal to use the court registry to compile reports on systemic non-compliance with procedural requirements.

* The New Zealand Law Society, the Legal Services Agency, and the Justice Ministry to work together to ensure the competence and integrity of the legal profession working in the legal aid system.

* Set up a mechanism for complaints about legal aid.

* Provide some funding for lead providers who supervise the training of junior lawyers.

* Through a combined effort by agency, ministry and law society, train lawyers in small firms and rural areas.

* Set up a specialist panel to review suspect lawyers' conduct and include an appeal system.

* Impose sanctions such as temporary ineligibility for new legal aid assignments, reduction in payments, supervision or training, suspension and removal of accreditation.

* Review legal aid remuneration rates with the long-term goal of being nearer Crown Solicitor rates.

* Hold a further review of the quality of legal aid services in three years time to check progress.

* If progress was not good enough set up a regulatory body completely independent from the legal profession.

* Use the public defence service in courts in main centres and in smaller centres suffering from quality problems -- such as Palmerston North.

* Government to consider expanding publicly provided legal services to civil law and family cases.

* Change legislation to allow more flexibility in the procurement of legal services.

* Introduce bulk funding of groupings of lawyers, headed by senior lawyers, to provide legal aid services.

* Retain suitable senior lawyers for use in appropriate cases, at a higher rate than is currently paid in the legal aid system.

* Contract senior lawyers for services to bulk-funded groupings of lawyers or to publicly provided services. For example for complex cases, where there was a conflict of interest or too many cases.

* Streamline the eligibility assessment process for criminal, civil, and family cases that fall below a cost threshold.

* Not require repayment for those who pass the assessment.

* Cases above the threshold to follow the standard granting process and remain subject to assessment for repayments.

* People who choose their own lawyer to face closer scrutiny and be subject to assessment for the purposes of repaying their legal aid.

* The high-cost case management panels should be led by a senior public servant, and include experts.

* Urgently clarify funding streams for Treaty of Waitangi Claims and modify them to ensure there is no possibility of double-dipping or triple-dipping by claimants or lawyers.