The rows set to boil over this year

“There is an urgent need to increase prosecution fees to those of defence fees,” Kirsty Brimelow KC, chairwoman of the Criminal Bar Association, said. Brimelow, with her predecessor, Jo Sidhu KC, led the Bar strike that forced the government to concede on defence rates.

Any gratitude to ministers from Brimelow has long since passed. She said that the “government parrots that it is investing in victim support, but this is pointless if there aren’t actually enough barristers to prosecute the cases”. She added: “The criminal justice system is a touchpoint for how society functions. It is visible and engenders trust for commercial litigation, which brings huge amounts of money into the economy. It is a false economy to scrimp on the criminal justice system and to starve funds from the barristers who prosecute.”

Brimelow played a clever card by referring to commercial litigation and the wider legal services market in the UK. Just days before the curtain fell on 2022, TheCityUK published research demonstrating the country’s “world-leading status as a centre for international legal services and dispute resolution”.

The lobbying group for the Square Mile said that there had been a 12.5 per cent increase in income from legal services over the past year to £41 billion. That pot of gold made the UK the “largest legal services market in Europe and second only to the US globally”.

Researchers at the group highlighted that two thirds of approximately 375,000 people employed in legal services were based in towns and cities outside London, with Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham being the big three centres outside the capital.

But there was no slacking at City law firms. The report noted that revenue generated by the UK’s largest 100 law firms grew by 9 per cent to £31.4 billion in 2021-22, a rise of more than 50 per cent over the past decade.

Dominic Raab is continuing to push the Bill of Rights

ALAMY

“The UK’s legal services sector continues to be a great British success story,” Miles Celic, the group’s chief executive, said. He added that the UK was “the preferred legal hub in Europe”.

Colin Passmore, chairman of the City of London Law Society and a partner at Simmons & Simmons, agreed that law firms in the Square Mile were “in good shape”. He warned, however, that “to maintain this success means protecting and promoting the UK’s well-earned international reputation as a jurisdiction of choice for business, despite . . . the increasing competition posed by other international courts”.

Blood and guts criminal work may seem another world compared to the commercial law practised in the City, but Brimelow argued that the latter’s credibility suffered if the former was underfunded.

The KC highlighted the government’s policy of pre-recording cross-examination of vulnerable witnesses as “heading for failure without proper funding of the barristers who are defending and prosecuting these cases”. Her association said that barristers were refusing to take cases that involved a pre-recorded cross-examination because they effectively involved preparing twice for trial but only being paid once.

Lubna Shuja, president of the Law Society, the body that represents solicitors in England and Wales, is virtually apocalyptic in her view of the forthcoming months. She said: “2023 is likely to see an acceleration in the systemic failure of our justice system.” She pointed to the court backlogs and “vast legal aid deserts” where state-funded lawyers were non-existent.

But Shuja is particularly exercised about the “failing” duty solicitor scheme, which she said meant that the right to representation at police stations was in peril”.

She called on ministers to give criminal defence solicitors “the minimum 15 per cent legal aid rates increase”. She added: “Investment in civil legal aid advice provision must also be made now.”

Nick Vineall KC, the recently installed chairman of the Bar Council, widened his analysis of 2023 to several “key parliamentary” issues, including the Bill of Rights, an almost personal mission being promoted by Dominic Raab, the justice secretary, and the proposed jettisoning of many EU laws that were carried over after the UK left the bloc. But he too has professional issues on his plate. “There needs to be a review of the role of the Legal Services Board, and we will continue to press the Bar Standards Board to ensure it improves on key targets,” Vineall said.

Martha Spurrier, the director of Liberty, the civil rights campaign group, urged ministers to have lofty aspirations in 2023. “It will be vital to stand up for the rights protections that we all hold dear,” she said. “That means respecting international law and the rulings of international courts, and ensuring people have access to remedies when their rights have been abused.”

Cases to watch in 2023

Roll up, you litigation fans — there is a bumper crop of bouts in the courts . . .

• On the criminal side is a case of particular interest to the Ministry of Justice as three former executives of the security company G4S are to stand trial on charges of defrauding the taxpayer in its operation of a prisoner-tagging contract.
• Also in the criminal courts, Bernie Ecclestone, the former boss of Formula One, is facing fraud charges over what prosecutors will say are hundreds of millions of pounds of unreported assets held abroad.
• In the civil courts, aeroplane enthusiasts will get out the popcorn in June, when the increasingly acrimonious dispute over peeling paint between Qatar Airways and Airbus is set to move to the main event after a series of pre-trial hearings.
• And then to a civil court action in which just about everyone in the UK has a bit of skin in the game – the consumer case against Mastercard, which is being brought by the former financial services ombudsman, Walter Merricks. The US company is set to go back to court this month to challenge yet another element of the claim.

Lawyers predict rise in litigation amid economic downturn

Nothing signals the onset of recession like the combination of the words disputes, debt recovery and fraud.

That is the chant coming from senior lawyers at large UK corporations in a report published today setting out their predictions for the most lively areas of legal practice in 2023.

Surveyed in November, 50 general counsel and chief legal officers were asked to identify the areas where they expected the most increase this year. About 75 per cent predicted a likely rise in litigation owing to an economic downturn. That view was supported by the 68 per cent who said that debt recovery work would rise, while about half said there was likely to be an increase in fraud cases.

The other red flag indicator of harsh economic conditions — employment disputes in part triggered by redundancy programmes — was raised by 46 per cent of legal department chiefs, who predicted a likely rise.

The report, which was produced by Winmark, an executive network, and sponsored by the London law firm Kingsley Napley, found that nearly 30 per cent of legal department senior lawyers predicted that their businesses were very likely or likely to “reduce workforce costs” — corporate speak for uncorking the “redundo red”.

Corinne Aldridge, the lead employment law partner at Kingsley Napley, said that the “three Rs, which many businesses are grappling with right now — recruitment, retention and remuneration — are not only the concern of human resources, but spill over to legal functions”.

Aldridge added that corporate general counsel must “ensure employment capabilities are adequately considered in the resourcing of their teams for 2023” — which translates to assess a range of issues beyond the simple weight of pay packets, including flexible working, conduct in the workplace, workload levels and general staff health.

One general counsel at a financial services company told the researchers that the best advice to the board was to “consider reducing staff hours from full time to part time, rather than headcount, so that everyone keeps their job”.

That same lawyer indicated that the debate between bosses and staff over home working was set to continue. The lawyer suggested that legal departments should advise chief executives to “encourage hybrid working staff to work more frequently or longer hours at the office to reduce domestic energy bills”. Ultimately, domestic utility bills could drive a return to pre-pandemic office occupancy where a range of perks — some City law firms offered free lunches and even allowed staff to bring pets to work — failed.

Corporate legal departments are predicted not to be exempt from the worsening cost of living crisis. Respondents to the survey forecast that the biggest issue over the next few months would be overheads. Nearly 70 per cent of respondents said that overhead costs generally would have a very high or high impact on their departments. More than 80 per cent feared that salary costs as well as issues around staff retention would have an equally high impact.