Sarah Sackman said the ministry would focus on backlogs
UK justice minister Sarah Sackman has said that legal aid solicitors in the UK will not be compensated for losses related to the cyberattack on the UK Legal Aid Agency last year, reported the Law Society Gazette.
Sackman wrote in a letter that the ministry’s priority was addressing case backlogs; thus, it was not planning to establish a compensation scheme in relation to the cyber incident.
The House of Commons justice select committee had asked the justice ministry about compensation after submissions to the committee’s access to justice inquiry highlighted issues with the clarity, adequacy, and long-term consequences of emergency funding arrangements. Sackman said she knew providers were concerned about added burdens associated with contingency operations; she indicated that the justice ministry had collaborated with stakeholders to trial new or amended service functionality, extend the the average payment scheme for civil certificated work, and pause audits to address administrative strain.
Last year, practitioners had told the minister about the volume of daily unpaid administrative work that had fallen on them due to the data breach. The committee asked Sackman if the justice department had reviewed the additional billable casework time resulting from the LAA’s system outage and the expense of completing paper applications.
Sackman replied that the evaluation could not be completed.
“Providers submit their claims over an extended period, and for many civil cases this may take months or even several years, particularly where providers are managing backlogs or only need to bill to match the level of average payment scheme recoupment. As a result, the full set of relevant claims from the outage period will not be available for some time,” she wrote in a statement published by the Gazette.
To claim any additional billable costs, Sackman directed practitioners to “normal billing processes” outlined in the costs assessment guidance. However, Jenny Beck, director at family law boutique Beck Fitzgerald, had informed Sackman last year that claims for downtime or system lags were considered office overheads and therefore could not be recovered.
Last November, Liverpool firm Broudie Jackson Canter said it was compiling a group litigation order urging the government to compensate legal aid applicants whose information was compromised in the hack.
