Liverpool firm Broudie Jackson Canter said it was preparing to sue the government
The recent cyberattack on the UK’s Legal Aid Agency has spurred a potential class action against the UK government, reported the Law Society Gazette.
Liverpool firm Broudie Jackson Canter revealed on its website that it was putting together a group litigation order calling for the government to compensate legal aid applicants whose information was compromised in the hack. The firm indicated that it would be representing plaintiffs on a “no win, no fee” basis, according to the Gazette.
Express Solicitors, KP Law, and HNK Solicitors also indicated that they were accepting potential claims.
Since the May cyberattack, the LAA said hackers may have accessed personal information dating back to 2007. The agency has not yet confirmed how many were affected; according to deputy chief executive Jane Harbottle, the structure of its systems and data storage complicated the provision of such information.
“We have 48 different systems, we’ve got 120 different components, all house various pockets of data. The data appears as a number of transactions, so there’s no whole [legal aid file] that could have been extracted. There is no file. It appears in a series of different transactions in different buckets in different parts of the system,” Harbottle said in a statement to the House of Commons public accounts committee last month that was published by the Gazette.
Compromised data include legal aid applicants’ contact details and addresses, birth dates, national insurance numbers, criminal histories, employment statuses, and financial data. Solicitors were impacted as well after the hack led to the LAA’s systems being shut down and they were unable to log work.
The Law Society of England and Wales called for solicitors to be compensated for the trouble they experienced; however, the UK justice ministry rejected a distinct compensation route for solicitors this month. Solicitors were told to file concerns through the complaints procedure page on the LAA’s website.
