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Legal Aid lawyers more efficient than private users of public funds
Legal Aid’s in-house lawyers are less likely to enter late guilty pleas and more likely to have matters finalised in the local court than their publicly funded private counterparts, according to the preliminary findings of a new study.
Grace Ormsby
The findings, which point to greater efficiency of in-house legal aid lawyers come from the first ever comparison in Australia of private versus public lawyers in finalising publicly funded Legal Aid cases by NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR).
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Legal Aid NSW requested BOCSAR undertake the research due to concern that the “billable hours” system and the comparatively low fees paid to private lawyers doing legal aid work “may create an incentive to maximise the number of hours spent on each case, thereby delaying the resolution of cases”, a statement said.
The results, presented at the 6th Annual Applied Research in Crime and Justice Conference showed that a case assigned to a private lawyer is approximately 13 to 14 per cent less likely to be dealt with summarily after entering a guilty plea, compared to a similar case being dealt with by an in-house lawyer.
The study also showed that private lawyers funded by Legal Aid are eight to nine per cent more likely to enter a late guilty plea than in-house lawyers, while being less likely to be committed for sentence than in-house lawyers.
Commenting on the released findings, BOCSAR’s executive director Dr Don Weatherburn said they showed that “the ways lawyers are paid can make a big difference to the way criminal cases are dealt with”.
The study compared outcomes for cases dealt with by legal aid funded private lawyers to cases dealt with by Legal Aid’s in-house lawyers, while controlling for differences in the types of cases dealt with by each, BOCSAR said.
