The Law Society of NSW has long advocated for fairer and sustainable rates for Legal Aid work performed by private solicitors. We’ve had some success. In 2019 the NSW Government announced an additional $88 million to increase fees paid to solicitors who perform this often challenging and sometimes confronting legal work.

The four years of modest increases which that funding allowed have now come to an end. According to the recently published Independent Review of the National Legal Assistance Partnership (NLAP) 2020-2025, the legal aid rates paid to private solicitors across Australia were still less than half that paid to private solicitors on government legal panels.

In recommendation 18, the Independent Reviewer, Dr Warren Mundy, recommended the development of a new framework for legal aid rates for private practitioners to be considered by the Standing Council of Attorneys General.

In a recent opinion piece published in the national media, the President of the Law Council of Australia, Greg McIntyre SC, said legal assistance work is:

… underpinned by the private legal profession, which takes on approximately 72 per cent of approved legal aid grant cases. The private legal profession undertakes this work, despite receiving appallingly low rates of compensation for this increasingly difficult and complex work.

To borrow and adapt a famous statement about business management, you can’t fix what you don’t measure.

To that end, National Legal Aid has launched a survey for private practitioners who, in the past two years, have done at least one of the following:

• worked on a legal aid case;
• been on a legal aid panel (even if you haven't worked on a legal aid case); or
• worked for an organisation on a list of preferred suppliers of legal aid.