Category Archives: costs

LAA LAA land (or judicially reviewing the legal aid bods and winning)

Posted on May 2, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

Ooh, exciting. I am grateful to M’learned friend Miss Eleanor Battie of counsel for highlighting this case to me.

T, R and Legal Aid Agency 2013

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2013/960.html

Miss Battie has done a very good summary of the case here, on the UK Human Rights blog

LAA must give reasons about funding expert assessments in care proceedings – Eleanor Battie

In essence, you may recall that the Legal Aid Agency (previously the Legal Services Commission, previously the Legal Aid Board) implemented, with the express authority of Parliament, a series of measures aimed at reducing the burgeoning costs of expert assessments. That was a fairly laudable aim, there could be no doubt that we had reached a point where the demand for expert reports was so exceeding supply that there was almost a housing-style bubble with experts being able to name their fee if you wanted them to do the work.

Unfortunately, and in classic State grasping control of an issue style, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.

Almost every case involving an expert became embroiled in a battle of bureaucracy (I am reminded of A P Herbert’s beautiful expression “I have been engaged in exhaustive, if one-sided correspondence”) where solicitors got the Court to agree the expert assessment that was needed to fight for their client but then it couldn’t happen because the LAA wouldn’t agree to pay for it.

This culminated in the issue coming before the then President of the Family Division, Wall LJ, who found that his request for a representative of the LAA/LSC to attend and clarify things wasn’t complied with, and when he telephoned, was told more or less (and this isn’t really an exaggeration) Oh, we don’t attend court hearings when we’re ordered to, we get so many of those orders, we just ignore them.

But the President reluctantly concluded that the power to order assessments and order that they be paid for (arising from section 38(6), the Family Procedure Rules and the Calderdale case) had evaporated, and it was now the LSC/LAA who had the final say, not the family Court.

This was in A Local Authority v D S and Others 2012 http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2012/1442.html

where the President wove a fairly cunning trap for the LSC, although told them up front that this was a trap, and they should be ready for it, that a careful judicial decision that a report was necessary, coupled with careful analysis of why and why the costs were proportionate, would probably pave the way for a judicial review of an unreasonable refusal.

And so we arrived at a mountain of preambles in every single case involving an expert, just in case anyone was going to judicially review the LSC.

We also, in the interim, had Ryder LJ determine that the LSC had the power to say no to paying the costs of an expert assessment where the Court had decided one was needed but the parents had no funding and no money to pay for it.

So, we arrive now at this case, where once again, the Judge asked the LSC to attend/communicate with her and they declined to do so.

The judgment and order directing the expert assessment was very careful and completely D S and Others compliant, yet the LSC refused the assessment.

In the judicial review, Collins J, who accepts from the outset that he is not a family Judge (and thank heavens for that, given that he actually seemed prepared to put the child first, rather than the LAA’s interest), makes it plain that the LSC /LAA have the power to refuse or partly refuse the costs of an assessment ordered by the Court, but that if they do so, they HAVE to give reasons, and the reasons have to take into account that a Judge who knows the case and all of the issues gave a careful judgment saying that the report was necessary.

[I’m a bit saddened that Collins J, in an otherwise magnificent judgment, resisted the temptation to say “The LAA have great power, but as Spiderman could tell us, with great power, comes great responsibility”. This is why I will never, ever be made a Judge]

The LAA plead the impossibility of this, saying effectively that they say no so often that they don’t have the resources to give reasons each time.

Collins J rolls up his sleeves, takes firm hold of the baseball bat, and knocks that one clean out of the park.

While there is no statutory requirement for reasons to be given by the defendant, the law has developed to require reasons where fairness so dictates. Cases such as these where children may be removed from parental care involve Article 8 of the ECHR and the welfare of the child which is paramount. There is an obvious requirement that all proper steps are taken to enable a judge to reach an informed decision when dealing with those rights. The parties and the court are in my view clearly entitled to understand why a refusal to allow what the court has considered necessary has been made so that it can, if appropriate, be challenged speedily.

The letter of 19 March 2013 gives no reasons to explain why the full sum put forward is not approved. Since the defendant appeared through its representative, Mr Michael Rimer, at the hearing of S it was clearly aware of the President’s guidance. Guidance in this field from so authorative source as the President, in a reserved judgment after hearing submissions from, amongst others the LSC, gives rise to a public law duty upon the LSC, capable of being enforced, as the President said, by judicial review. Ms Hewson has sought to rely on the real difficulties faced by the defendant in dealing with the increasing number of applications for prior approval. In the S case it had been shown that following the new funding order in October 2011 introduced as part of the legal aid reform programme designed to save costs applications for prior approval of experts increased from 216 in November 2011 to 1855 in April 2012. That increase has, I was told, continued. Ms Hewson said that 4 employees in an office in Wales now had to deal with some 100 applications each week. That I suspect was something of an exaggeration but the point she was seeking to make was that the burden on those responsible for making the decision was such that they did not have the time to enter into any discussion nor to give any substantial reasons. Attempts to save costs in one way can have an effect which increases costs in another. If as a result of the new rules introduced in October 2011 greater pressure is imposed resources must be provided to meet that pressure. In R(H) v Ashworth Hospital Authority [2003] 1 WLR 127 at paragraph 76 Dyson LJ said this:-

“I absolutely reject the submission that reasons which would be inadequate if sufficient resources were available may be treated as adequate simply because sufficient resources are not available. Either the reasons are adequate or they are not and the sufficiency of resources is irrelevant to that question.”

These observations apply a fortiori where there is an absence of reasons when reasons are required.

I have to say, that I am delighted with the outcome, but rather surprised that the facts of this case got it. The expert assessment was for 180 hours, and the LAA originally agreed 130.

Given that their guidance figures for assessments are FAR FAR FAR below that, and the assessment costs as a whole were over £31,000 when the usual cost of an assessment has now come down to under £5,000 , the LAA would have had, I think, a decent case (had they (a) given reasons and (b) you know, bothered to file a skeleton argument in the JR case) for saying that the costs in this case were wildly disproportionate (those costs are rather more akin to the residential assessment that the LAA suspected this was in disguise)

So, if you do get a cost of an expert declined, make sure you get the reasons from the LAA, and remember that scarcity of resources to give good reasons don’t make inadequate reasons adequate…

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Posted in case law, costs, experts, judicial review and tagged duty to give reasons when refusing to pay for assessment, judicial review, laa, legal aid agency, LSC, prior authority, t r and legal aid agency. Bookmark the permalink.

“Not with a bang, but a whimper”

Posted on April 11, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

Possible fallout from R (JG) v the Legal Services Commission 2013

This is the much anticipated, and long-awaited, outcome of the judicial review against the LSC (now the Legal Aid Agency, LAA) and their refusal to pay the child’s solicitors the costs of an expert fee in private law proceedings where the Court had determined (a) that they needed expert evidence to determine the case (b) that the parents who were not in receipt of public funding could not pay for it, or even pay a third share of it, and thus (c ) that the entire costs of the expert assessment should fall upon the child’s public funding certificate.

That seemed to be the only way for the Court to obtain expert evidence when faced with parents representing themselves or who had no funds to pay for an expert; but many observers were becoming increasingly concerned that the Courts were appointing Guardians in private law cases not so much for what the Guardian could bring to the table, but so that the Court had access to the child’s public funding.

The LSC were always going to take a stand on this at some point, and refuse to pay all of the costs of an expert report when the parents were not contributing.

Here are some of the reasons, from a quick think, about why expert evidence might be needed in private law proceedings in order to reach a fair conclusion :-

The child presents as having psychiatric or psychological problems – maybe the child is self-harming, or has anorexia
The child has a medical condition, for example Asperger’s Syndrome, which may impact on change, or routines (and thus how contact and residence are to be managed), or the parent has a medical condition which affects their ability to care, or travel to contact
There are allegations of Parental Alienation Syndrome, or implacable hostility
There are historical concerns that require a risk assessment of future risk
There are allegations about substance misuse or alcohol misuse (testing, psychiatric evidence about prognosis)
There is a dispute about paternity that requires DNA evidence (unless the Court is going to start resolving paternity disputes without DNA testing)
There are concerns about the mental health of either parent which requires expert evidence as to diagnosis and prognosis

In our brave new world where neither parent is entitled to public funding, none of those assessments can be done unless someone is prepared to pay for them. And the LSC have made it plain that this someone is not going to be them, where they have been parachuted into the case as a portable chequebook (sorry, Rule 16.4 Guardian)

Sadly, the judgment in JG v LSC is not yet up, and I’m sure that the Court made attempts to put a ring fence around the most serious sorts of cases and put some exceptional circumstances in place (so I will return to the topic once the judgment is up)

But in broad terms, the child’s solicitor, and the Law Society lost, and the LSC won. Not a huge surprise. We all saw that coming. It doesn’t seem to me that the Courts fought the LSC on the beaches on either this one, or the prior authority case, the judgments in both may as well have been written on a white flag.

It seems, to this jaded hack, that Abu Qatada was able to get our Courts to do more for him, than the Law Society were able to get a Court to do for children. * I will cheerfully retract this, if when I see the judgment, it appears that a valiant but ultimately doomed attempt was made by the Court to preserve the interests of children as being paramount in the whole exercise.

*{too harsh? Probably, but I am a bit crosspatch about this. For example, in the recent planning case of Stevens v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government 2013, the Court reminded themselves that where a persons human rights are impacted disproportionately by a decision, the Court can look at things more widely than as a pure judicial review. Was that done in this case?

Furthermore,…….the House of Lords have held that, where the proportionality of the impact of a decision on human rights is at issue, that is a substantive question to be objectively determined by the court, and not a procedural one that requires the court to investigate the decision-making process (R (SB) v Governors of Denbigh High School [2006] UKHL 15: (“SB“) and Miss Behavin’ Ltd v Belfast City Council [2007] UKHL 19; (“Miss Behavin’“))

Thus, in SB, Lord Bingham said (at [29]):”The focus at Strasbourg is not and has never been on whether a challenged decision or action is the product of a defective decision-making process, but on whether, in the case under consideration, the applicant’s Convention rights have been violated”;

and, consequently, what matters in any case is “the practical outcome, not the quality of the decision-making process” (at [31]).

And I ask, what the practical outcome on children and families of having Courts wish to obtain expert evidence to achieve a fair result in a case but being prevented from doing so, would be?}

The LSC relied heavily, as they would, on section 22 (4) of the Access to Justice Act, which provides that costs should not fall on a publicly funded party that would not otherwise have fallen on the party if they were not publicly funded. [Of course, that Act was written at a time when the sheer volume of unrepresented litigants could not be foreseen, as it was pre LASPO, and I have yet to see whether the judgment wrestled with whether s22 (4) in these circumstances led to an incompatibility with section 1 of the Children Act 1989]

And the LSC thus argued, and were successful, that the Court would not have made an order that the father or mother pay the entire cost of the expert fee, and that the most the LSC should pay is an equal share, one third.

Where that leaves children, when the question for the Court in all those private law cases where the parents are not both in receipt of public funding (i.e nearly all of them) and the Court consider that an experts report is necessary to determine the case, is somewhere towards the source of the Swannee.

*( I think it would need to be both parents getting funding, since the same principles would apply to ‘parent gets public funding as a result of say domestic violence, would still be the LSC saying that they would only pay the share matched by the other parent)

Can a Court, in fact, order that a parent pay for the costs of a report? They are an adult, and I think the Court are in difficulties ordering an adult to incur costs, or to do anything (short of injunctions). The Court can merely say, if you want to run your case, then there will be consequences for your case if you don’t comply with the directions that have been made. Ordering an adult to do something, or pay for something seems to me to need some statutory basis for the Court having that jurisdiction.

So the Court can of course say “If you want to obtain this report and rely on it, then you will have to pay half of the costs. No costs, no report.”

But that doesn’t help, because of course, when you have two parties to litigation, one of them has a vested interest in not obtaining such a report. They are happy not to have it done.

And will any expert take on an instruction where the parents are paying privately? If it were me, I would want cash up front, because how would I get the payment from a mother if my report says something she doesn’t want to hear? Even if the parent is happy with the report, once they have it in their hands, what is the incentive to pay for it? So, cash up front is the only way.

And we are back, again, to the concept that money can buy you a better service in the family Courts (a parent on income support who wants a report on how their child’s Asperger’s Syndrome might impact on a shared residence arrangement is not going to get one, whereas a parent who is a quantity surveyor say can get the report)

It doesn’t feel too great to me, that in private law cases (and contrary to what the Family Procedure Rules say) the key question for a Court considering the need for an expert report is not

“Is this report necessary to assist the Court to resolve the proceedings” but

“Who will pay for this report?”

[Also, eek, will the LSC now try to clawback all of the expert fees that they have paid out to solicitors representing rule 16.4 guardians in the past?]

[Addendum – very grateful to 11kbw who have the judgment up on their website http://www.11kbw.com/judgments/docs/PNTCJudgment.pdf

readers can form their own impression as to whether the right of parties to a fair trial, and the issues of whether a broad principle that if parties can pay for a report it shouldn’t all fall on the LSC has been blurred with LASPO whereby a party can now be not in receipt of public funding although they have no means to pay for representation or disbursements. For my part, I thought an awful lot of the judgment was on the “well, we won’t be having those experts anymore, and this just helps with that” side of the fence.

For example para 67:-

“If the children’s guardian is of the view that the issues identified are beyond his or her skill and expertise, the Court may be minded to ask CAFCASS whether the case can be co-worked by an extended scope practitioner who if necessary can be appointed as a joint guardian”

The exceptions aren’t set out in detail , but are touched on in principle at para 87, the LSC having argued that the Court would have no jurisdiction even in extraordinary circumstances (the report being absolutely necessary, and the Court having carefully explored whether the other parties could pay a share or a reduced share) and the Court knocked the LSC back on this, though no other point; and said that there WOULD be circumstances in which if the report was necessary and there was simply no other way, the LSC might be ordered to pay for it.

[Although they don’t need to follow a court order, don’t need to appeal it, and there’s no legitimate expectation for a child’s solicitor that a court order ordering the LSC to pay for it will ever result in a cheque being written, so hooray!]

The overwhelming message I take away is – don’t worry too much about how you are going to fund experts, because there won’t be any. Bearing in mind that this judgment was prepared by the Judge seized with responsibility for modernisation of family justice, that’s an important message. But read it and decide for yourselves, it is very possible that I am being deeply unfair. ]

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Posted in case law, costs, experts and tagged jg v lsc, judicial review, legal aid agency. expert fees, legal services commission, sharing expert costs, sharing expert fees. Bookmark the permalink.

Transformers…. Cutting robots in disguise

Posted on April 9, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

One might have thought that in the week that LASPO kicked in, with huge chunks of areas of legal representation being taken out of the legal aid system, the Government might let those lawyers who survived and are still reeling have a little bit of respite.

You fools! Of course not. Following some sort of Sun Tzu Art of War philosophy, the Government have decided that the best time to kick people is when they are down.

Hence

“Transforming Legal Aid” – a new consultation (and we all know how ‘consultation’ works)

https://consult.justice.gov.uk/digital-communications/transforming-legal-aid

Here’s the waffle

6.6 Progress is currently being made to reduce the average duration of care cases through the implementation of the Family Justice Review reforms90 which should have the effect of reducing the unit cost of cases by tackling delay and streamlining cases, for example through reducing the use of experts.91 The national average duration of care cases has already reduced from around 54 weeks to around 45 weeks.92 The aim is to achieve an average of 26 weeks in all but exceptional cases, and this time limit will be enshrined in statute subject to parliamentary approval of the Children and Families Bill.93 Associated efficiencies in court proceedings are planned in support of this time limit. For example, the recent introduction of a new Part 25 of the Family Procedure Rules in January 2013 which requires the court to restrict expert evidence to those circumstances where it is necessary to assist court proceedings. This requirement will also be enshrined in statue through the Children and Families Bill94 which, subject to Parliamentary approval, is expected to receive Royal Assent next year. In reducing the commissioning of unnecessary expert reports, this requirement should also reduce the related work for solicitors. It is also expected that further efficiencies currently under development might also reduce the average number of hearings required in a case.

6.7 As the fee paid to solicitors for their work on a case is fixed, the cost of dealing with fewer experts or fewer hearings would not automatically adjust to reflect the likely reduction in the work required of solicitors (whereas any reduction in the number of hearings would lead automatically to a reduction in advocacy costs, as these are calculated on the basis of hearing fees). We consider that the legal aid fee paid for these proceedings should represent value for money and therefore reflect more closely the decreasing duration of cases in this area, the amount of work involved and the further efficiencies to be gained.

That’s all very long – what do they mean?

Well, now that care proceedings will be only lasting twenty six weeks (which, I hasten to remind everyone is a PROPOSAL which has not even been discussed by Parliament), that will mean less work has to be done by the lawyers, so we should pay them less.

How much less?

Ten per cent.

[Never mind that we don’t actually know yet the structure that would allow care cases to be concluded within 26 weeks, or that as I pointed out yesterday, NINE YEARS of striving to get care proceedings concluded within 40 weeks has resulted in more local authorities having an average length of proceedings ABOVE 60 weeks than BELOW 40, so there is no way of knowing whether a lawyer would be doing more or less work, or whether the aspirations for 26 weeks are going to be any more effective than the last nine years of targets]

6.10 We propose to reduce the representation fee paid to solicitors in public family law cases by 10%. We consider that this is a reasonable reflection of the decreasing duration of cases in this area, the amount of work involved and the further efficiencies to be gained.

6.11 This proposed reduction would apply to the current fixed fees under the Scheme. In addition, to promote efficient resolution of cases and avoid creating any incentive to delay, it would apply to the hourly rates that are payable where a case reaches the escape threshold.

And experts?

Waffle time

7.9 The current codified rates were introduced in October 2011. Prior to that time, there were no set rates for expert services, generally, and therefore little effective control over their cost. Instead, contracted legal aid solicitors, who remain responsible for engaging relevant experts as and when necessary, would bill the then LSC after the service had been provided and paid for, based on the fee requested by the individual expert in the particular case. The initial codification of expert rates therefore represented a necessary first step in providing clarity and control over spend on experts, while continuing to ensure access to necessary expert services as and when required.

Upshot? Fees to experts to be cut by 20 per cent

I know that this blog is read by people who aren’t lawyers, and aren’t experts, and they may well be thinking – good, cut the costs of these fat cats. That’s certainly the Daily Mail take on it (a good rule of thumb in life, I find, is where you find yourself agreeing with the Daily Mail take on anything, you probably need to take a hard look at either yourself or the facts)

The reality is that if you cut the income of a group of professionals by 10% one year and 10% the next (lawyers) or 20% in one fell swoop (experts), then some of them will go under. That means less choice, less availability, more delay, less chance that the parents who need them will be able to get them.

The ones that do keep going will be forced to do more work for less money, which means spending less time on each case. If we want the best chance of proper justice for families, the lawyers instructed by parents need to have the ability to give the proper time that it takes to prepare a case, to form a proper meaningful relationship with the parent so that there is understanding on both sides and to give advice that is based on that solid understanding of both the facts and the people.

And if you think this is the end of the cuts, you’d be mistaken. If the Government manage to push through removing huge swathes of free legal advice, and cut the income of those who are left by 20% in two years, they will be back again for another cut in 2014, 2015 until there is nothing left to cut. [Ideally perhaps to the point where solicitors doing family law will pay the Government for each case they take on]

Consultation responses to this new document are due by June 2013 – the response details are on the link I started with. I found myself seriously pondering Edmund Burke’s words when thinking about this.

Our new Minister for Justice, the Rt Honourable Mr Megatron, reporting for Efficiency Saving duty. Tremble before him

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Posted in consultation, costs, experts and tagged consultation on legal aid, cuts to family legal aid, cuts to legal aid, expert fees, legal aid, solicitors fees, transforming legal aid. Bookmark the permalink.

Keep feeling FAScination, or Bolt-On Wanderers

Posted on March 1, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

(Yes, two awful puns in one title)

If you do any advocacy in family proceedings, you will be familiar with the FAS form (the Family Advocacy Scheme) that the advocate has to hand in to the Court to have stamped, in order to get paid for their work.

It is a peculiar creature, and the scheme has been plagued by inconsistencies about what one has to have stamped, or signed, or initialled.

If you are not the advocate, but another participant in the hearing, you may have wondered what that form was all about. It all seems very unseemly that you see advocates at the end of the hearing waving pieces of paper about like a bunch of Tory backbenchers

You can find the form here

http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/forms/legal-aid/advocates-attendance-form-0212.pdf

The FAS form came about in part because the previous form called SIPS had allowed advocates to claim some time for “special preparation” i.e that the case had taken more hours of preparation than one would usually expect. There were suspicions (and in one high profile case, more than suspicions) that these “special preparation” hours were sometimes padded to make the attendance at Court pay a bit better. Everyone has to eat, after all.

The other big change about FAS was that it suddenly applied to solicitors as well as barristers, and that while it was a reduction in fees for a barrister, it was quite an increase for solicitors, making advocacy now the ‘juiciest’ part of a case for a solicitor to do, thus placing solicitors and barristers in competition for the advocacy task in cases. Classic divide and rule stuff.

The first thing this FAS form ushered in was the need for advocates to record on the form :

Start time or time court required you to attend (if earlier):

And that in turn ushered in the otherwise inexplicable practice of everyone wanting to turn up an hour before the hearing starts, and the Court orders always incorporating a direction that they do so.

The next peculiar things relate to the “Bolt ons”, or uplifts to the fee for attending.

There are 4 of them :-

1. Representation of a client who is facing allegations that they have caused significant harm to a child which have been made or adopted by the Local Authority and are a live issue in proceedings

2. Representation of a person who has difficulty in giving instructions or understanding advice

3. The evidence of an independent expert witness being cross-examined and substantially challenged by a party at the hearing

4. The size of the Court bundle (there being a higher fee once the bundle passes 350 pages and then another higher fee once the bundle passes 700 pages)

The first 3 represent a 25% increase each.

To be honest, there’s an element of that that seems fair enough. If you are representing a parent who has learning difficulties or mental health problems, then explaining the process, taking instructions and getting a sense of what is happening on the ground is harder. [Although helpfully, you don’t get the bonus unless there’s a cognitive assessment, so the first hearing, where you really earn the money, you don’t get it, and the later hearing where you take instructions from the Official Solicitor and the task is made easier, you then do get it]

Likewise if you are going to a hearing knowing that you are going to need to cross-examine an expert then you have to put more work into it. And if you are going to have to read 700 pages rather than 350, it takes longer to read them.

But as any economist would tell you (and sadly, the LSC don’t seem to have asked any), if you give any group of individuals a reward and remuneration system based on certain indicators, they will work at meeting those indicators. It’s called ‘gaming the system’ and is found in pretty much any walk of life where there’s a performance related pay system.

For example, the LSC wanted to pay advocates less for any hearing that took less than an hour. That seemed like a pretty smart scheme, but in reality, it was only going to have two outcomes (as the payment for doing a hearing less than an hour was perceived as being far too low)

If the start clock for the hearing time starts at 10.00am (when the Court starts hearing cases), then nobody would be ready before 11.00am, to make sure they go into the second hour and get a proper payment. Thus keeping the Court waiting, and losing one of the five hours of Court sitting time a day. So yay, reducing effective Court sitting hours by 20% !

OR, and the above is why it happened, the Courts acquiescing to the request of advocates for a direction that they attend at 9.00am, or 9.15am, so that the clock just starts running earlier.

Another example would be that it now being rewarding to pad the court bundle out with documents to get it past the 350, or 700 page mark (and ideally documents that don’t really have to be read that thoroughly) led to a proliferation of contact notes, medical records, police disclosure, foster care diaries and such to go into the bundle. That in turn leads to the cost of everyone else reading them (assuming they get read at all)

Don’t get me wrong, there are occasions when those disclosure documents are very important and necessary – but they don’t go in only when important and necessary, but as run of the mill. And there’s no attempt to try to agree the key pages and winnow the disclosure documents down (firstly because nobody really reads them to find the key documents until the days before the final hearing, and secondly because why would you want to spend hours reading them in order to winnow them down so that you can cut your fees?)

And then we have the peculiar quirk in the section of

Representation of a client who is facing allegations that they have caused significant harm to a child which have been made or adopted by the Local Authority and are a live issue in proceedings

[25% bonus to the fee if it applies]

Firstly, that it only applies where the allegations are a ‘live issue’ in proceedings. That means there is no bonus in cases where the threshold has been agreed (which is something the court tries to encourage, as part of the process of narrowing the issues and to concentrate on those things that are in dispute) or determined by the Court.

Secondly, the criteria for what constitutes significant harm is a little perplexing, since it is not ‘significant harm’ in the sense which is defined by the actual bloody Act that we deal with, or the wealth of caselaw by which that definition has been polished, glossed and finessed, but instead a particularly narrow subset of it :-

For the purposes of the bolt-on the following conditions constitute significant harm:

a) death

b) significant head and/or fracture injuries

c) burns or scalds

d) fabricated illness

e) extensive bruising involving more than one part of the body

f) multiple injuries of different kinds

g) other significant ill-treatment (such as suffocation or starvation) likely to endanger life

h) sexual abuse.

You will note that the big loser here is neglect [and also emotional harm]. Unless the neglect is likely to endanger life (which is very rarely the case), you don’t get an uplift for neglect. But you will get an uplift if the child has five bruises, even if that’s a really small part of the threshold.

Anyone who has done care proceedings knows that neglect cases require a lot of thought, a lot of effort, a lot of preparation and really are cases where the ‘devil is in the detail’. An advocate representing a parent in a case where the harm alleged is neglect is going to have to go through a wealth of material often many years of records, looking at reports of home conditions and children’s presentation, watching how they fluctuate, looking at the support that has been offered and how that has impacted, looking at the chronology for periods when the care was good enough and Local Authority concerns subsided, working out how best to refute the allegations of neglect, or to reduce the risk for the future, how to get the situation to a level where the Court can have confidence in the future care of the children.

If you add into that mix that the child also has five bruises, and that finds its way into the threshold, the advocate will get 25% more on their fee, when the extra work involved is really looking at one medical report, a bodymap and perhaps some GP notes at around the time the injuries were observed.

Frankly, if the potential consequences for a parent of the allegations of significant harm are that they might lose their child, even temporarily, isn’t that the key aspect which means that they want their advocate to be totally prepared and recompensed properly to fight their case?

You probably can’t ever design a scheme for the payment of advocates which is flawless, but this particular one has ended up with Courts routinely directing parties to attend an hour before the hearing with no thought as to whether that’s actually necessary (including doing that for hearings where there will have been an advocates meeting the night before to get an order pulled together), an expansion of court bundles, and there being no recognition that preparation and defence of neglect cases is actually pretty labour intensive compared to a case of five bruises.

I do miss the old days where we just wrote on the directions “Certified fit for counsel” and any grubby issues of money were dealt with solely by the clerks and nobody at the Court ever had to think about money and fees and could focus exclusively on the case and the client. I really don’t like those forms being handed in at the end of the hearing, just at the time when the client really needs 100% focus on them.

It does feel to me like a shame that so much of our hearings these days seem to be focussed on money, and who is going to pay for this and that, whether the LSC will pay for this or that, what the expert is going to cost, what can be filled in on the FAS form, whether the LSC will accept the FAS form if the Judge hasn’t initialled it here, here and again here.

In a Jonathon Swift style suggestion, perhaps in the interests of making advocates feel too ashamed to hand in the form and thus reduce costs, the LSC should name the next form “Ski-holiday fund form” or “the ME-ME-ME” form, and insist that if advocates do not hand it up to the Judge in front of the clients saying “May I now hand in my Ski-holiday Fund form?” it is null and void. Further protocol should be for the Judge to look at the form, whistle in amazement and say the phrase “Gosh, you’ve done really well out of this, haven’t you? Bet you’re off shopping now at Harvey Nicks” or alternatively, depending on circumstances “Bloody hell, money for old rope” *

And now, because it is Friday, and it is an excuse to please some of my readership, here is a picture of the handsome Michael FASSbender

* That is intended to be satirical. Good Barristers do work very hard for their clients and put in long hard and unsociable hours, and those doing care work don’t necessarily live a salubrious lifestyle, and some of them are allergic to fondue and don’t go ski-ing.

[And last minute edit – I am being too harsh overall – the vast majority of advocates are worse off under FAS then they used to be and are doing the same hard job for less money, and nobody wants to do that. It only takes a few of the sharper advocates, the Edgar Venal’s of this world (as if he would sully his hands with care work) to make the system’s rules favour them to create that bad impression. I honestly don’t like, and never have, the idea that the last thing we do in a court hearing involving people’s children is connected with getting paid and think it is ugly and charmless that the system forces advocates to do it. Also in fairness to FAS I should have said that the one really good thing is that finally, one gets paid more for representing parents – which is the hardest job and one which takes the most preparation, than for representing the child]

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Posted in costs and tagged attendance at court, bolt ons for family advocacy, counsel's fees, FAS form, fees for advocacy. Bookmark the permalink.

“An unhelpful cocktail”

Posted on February 11, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

The interesting case of Re A (A Child) 2013.

The Court of Appeal dealt here with a case where some pretty appalling case management occurred with the appellants legal team, and whether a costs order should flow from that. They determined that in the absence of being able to show that costs had been incurred by the other parties for which they could be compensated, one could not make a wasted costs order purely as a punitive measure, no matter how awful the litigation conduct.

But it is worth looking at the litigation conduct, just because it is a dull day indeed when one isn’t interested when “I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres. Thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end. Like quills upon the fretful porpentine…. “

Lo, the case is here:-

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2013/43.html

The appeal related to a serious finding of fact hearing in care proceedings, a significant number of fractures on a very young baby, where the Judge found that these were caused non-accidentally.

Some time after those findings, the solicitors representing the parents became aware of the decision in London Borough of Islington v Al Alas and Wray [2012] EWHC 865 (Fam) and legitimately considered the findings again in the light of that case, particularly whether there was an alternative medical explanation along the lines of vitamin D deficiency and rickets.

They sought leave to appeal from the trial judge, who refused.

They then applied to the Court of Appeal, primarily asking whether leave to instruct an expert to look at the case was required. The Court of Appeal considered the case, felt that a fresh expert assessment was desirable and granted that leave, then listing a Permission to Appeal hearing to take place after the expert assessment could be considered.

All of that is perfectly fine and proper.

[I blogged about that appeal hearing HERE https://suesspiciousminds.com/2012/11/22/more-on-vitamin-d-and-rickets/

In short, the Court of Appeal did not consider that the Judge at first instance was wrong, let alone plainly wrong, and that the medical evidence, including the fresh report came nowhere near substantiating a medical explanation for the fractures. ]

But this particular judgment comes about as a result of the Local Authority and Guardian feeling so aggrieved by the parents litigation conduct that they asked for a costs hearing.

This is why :-

6. a) At the first, without notice, oral hearing the solicitors failed in their duty to provide the court with full and frank disclosure of all relevant material. In particular the bundle submitted did not include the original fact finding judgment or the section of the trial bundle that included the expert medical evidence;

b) The court was misled by an assertion in the grounds of appeal that the solicitors had had to prepare the case in a limited time period, whereas the reality was that they had the papers in the case for 18 weeks prior to filing their grounds of appeal;

c) After the September hearing the solicitors failed to disclose any relevant and necessary information to the Local Authority and the solicitors for the child until 16^th October. The information withheld included a note of the 19^th September hearing, the letter of instruction to Professor Nussey, Professor Nussey’s report (which had been received on 3^rd October), the progress report sent by the parents’ solicitors to the Court of Appeal on 3^rd October in accordance with my direction and any detail of the extensive supplementary questions and communications passing between the parents’ solicitors and Professor Nussey;

d) Professor Nussey was not instructed in a manner that would comply with the Family Procedure Rules 2010, Part 25 and the associated Practice Direction governing the instruction of experts. In particular, the Professor was not furnished with a copy of the 2010 fact finding judgment and/or the expert medical reports upon which the judge had relied. Instead the Professor was, for example, provided with the parents’ solicitors’ critique of that judgment setting out some 26 points which they said supported a benign medical explanation for the fractures that had been detected;

e) Once Professor Nussey’s report was available to the parents’ legal team, a clear view should have been taken that there was no longer any prospect of achieving permission to appeal. The decision to press on and mount arguments which this court ultimately found were unsustainable, went beyond the bounds of pursuing a hopeless case and amounted to an abuse of the court process.

Ms Jo Delahunty QC, representing the child, supports the criticisms made by the Local Authority and seeks to stress the substantial degree to which, in her submission, the parents’ solicitors fell short of their duty to comply with the ordinary standards of transparency and co-operation required of those engaged in child protection proceedings in the Family Division. In particular, she points to the fact that the non-disclosure for nearly a month of information relating to the without notice hearing in September was not a result of inefficiency or incompetent administration, but arose from the deliberate assertion by the parents’ solicitors that the other parties were simply not entitled to any of this material unless and until permission to appeal is granted. She is also particularly critical of the way in which the expert was unilaterally lobbied by the parents’ legal team with, it is suggested, the aim of turning his initial adverse opinion into one which was more favourable to their case.

In addition to the criticisms made of the litigation actions in the period between 19^th September and 1^st November, both counsel for the Local Authority and counsel for the child draw the court’s attention to the stance taken by the parents’ representatives at this hearing. Mr Prest drew attention to what he regarded was the startling difference between the world view in relation to these matters taken by the parents’ representatives and the reality of the approach required by the Family Justice System. In similar terms Ms Delahunty submitted that, in seeking to explain their behaviour and avoid adverse criticisms, counsel for the parents’ solicitors, Mr Michael Shrimpton, in his skeleton argument, was simply not speaking in the same language as the lawyers representing the Local Authority and the child. In particular Ms Delahunty points to the fact that, rather than offering an acceptance of poor case management and an apology to the court, Mr Shrimpton’s skeleton argument seeks to meet each of the matters raised head on and to question their validity. For example the case for the parents’ solicitors, who are a well known Birmingham firm of family specialists, questions the validity and legitimacy of FPR 2010 Part 25 insofar as it applies to Family Proceedings at first instance and asserts that, in any event, those provisions have absolutely no application to a pending appeal. They assert that the instruction of an expert in the course of an application for permission to appeal may be undertaken in total disregard of the Family Procedure Rules and the practice otherwise applicable to a family case.

Let me just flesh that out, because it may be so peculiar that it does not quite sink in – they obtained permission to appeal saying that they had had ‘limited time to prepare their case’ (when they had in fact had 18 weeks – some people, not me, but some other people, might actually go so far as to say that this is not a generous interpretation or disingenuous, or misleading, but a straight downright lie)

having obtained the permission of the Court of Appeal to instruct an expert, the parents solicitors then don’t give the expert the medical reports AND Judgment in the fact finding hearing, but instead a sprawling 26 point submission prepared by them as to why rickets is the cause of the injury, they don’t try to agree a letter of instruction or include any questions that the other sides would like asked, they don’t initially disclose the report of that expert to the other sides, they try to get the expert to change his mind after seeing his report, and when all of this is highlighted to them, they argue that the Family Proceedings Rules don’t apply to appeals in, erm family proceedings.

I also like this bit – the parents solicitors, in another case (oh my god) had gone off to get an overseas expert without leave of the court and then (once it was favourable to rely on it)

In January 2012 the parents’ solicitors acted for different parents in an application for permission to appeal which is now reported as Re McC (Care Proceedings: Fresh Evidence of Foreign Expert) [2012] EWCA Civ 165; [2012] 2 FLR 121. In that case, without the knowledge of, let alone the leave of, the Court of Appeal, the parents’ solicitors obtained a medical report from an American paediatrician and sought leave to adduce it as fresh evidence to support a proposed appeal. In his judgment refusing permission to adduce the evidence, with which the other two members of the court agreed, Thorpe LJ said:

“14. There are many reasons for refusing this application. It does not begin to satisfy the conditions identified in the well known case of Ladd v Marshall [1954] 1 WLR 1489. It is a report which is deeply flawed in the manner of its production. The respondents to these proceedings were given no notice of the intention to go elsewhere and to knock on another expert door. No permission was sought from this court either to instruct another expert or to release documents from the case to that expert and such documents as were released were not comprehensive and were apparently partisan.

15. I would have absolutely no hesitation in refusing this application but I do want to emphasise that there is, in my judgment, an obligation on an applicant for permission, or an appellant who has obtained permission, to seek leave from this court before instructing a fresh expert and releasing court papers to that expert for the purposes of the hearing of either an adjourned application for permission or an appeal.

16. I would also emphasise the importance of the Guidelines for the Instruction of Medical Experts from Overseas in Family Cases, endorsed by the President and published by the Family Justice Council last month. They must by extension apply to appellate proceedings although the guidelines are of course written specifically in contemplation of proceedings at first instance.”

Mr X submits that both he and his instructing solicitors were unclear as to the meaning of those passages from Thorpe LJ’s judgment in Re McC. He tells me that they did not understand whether or not it was incumbent upon them to apply for the leave of the Court of Appeal before seeking to instruct an expert to provide a report for use in support of their application for permission to appeal. In their minds, therefore, the purpose of the 19^th September hearing was simply to seek the direction of the Court of Appeal on whether or not a full blown application for leave to instruct an expert, which Mr X tells me would have been on notice to the other parties, should be made.
I confess that I am at a loss to understand that submission and ask, rhetorically, how Mr X and the Solicitors Firm could fail to understand the words “there is …. an obligation …. to seek leave from this court before instructing a fresh expert”. The account given in the Notice of Appeal to the effect that the Court of Appeal decision in Re McC, from which I have quoted, had simply ‘expressed some sympathy’ with the view that leave to instruct an expert was required and that the decision had not by that stage been reported is, on the facts, plainly unsustainable.
The words of Lord Justice Thorpe are entirely plain and clear and, for the record, I regard his words as being entirely uncontroversial. The general approach, if not indeed the detailed requirements, of the Family Procedure Rules must, as Thorpe LJ holds, by extension apply to appellate proceedings.

So even though the firm of solicitors had been slapped by the Court of Appeal for getting a back door expert, and the Court of Appeal had given clear guidance on this exact point, they didn’t understand what it meant?

But all of that is okay, because the counsel representing them (although not a care lawyer, or indeed a family lawyer) is :-

a member of British Mensa and that he ‘by definition brings a Mensa-level intellect to the analysis of complex scientific and legal issues’

[If you are wondering, the quotation marks do indeed indicate that the Court of Appeal are quoting directly from counsel’s own skeleton argument. Yes, in a costs hearing in the Appeal Court, before Lord Justice McFarlane, this barrister put in writing that he was clever…. – not just in writing, but orally, and not just once, but “on a number of occasions”]

Oh. My. God.

If you aren’t cringing, writhing a tiny bit and dying a little bit inside on behalf of this man, you are a crueller person than even I am.

Mr X’s approach to these proceedings readily supports the submissions that I have recorded from both of the opposing counsel to the effect that the case he presents comes from a totally different ‘world view’ and speaks in a ‘different language’ from that of the local authority and the child’s legal team. Mr X is a brave and confident advocate who gives the strong impression of believing the cause for which he advocates. These various factors, high intellect, a lack of understanding of the justification for the approach taken in family proceedings and the brave championing of a cause, are, in my view, the unhelpful cocktail of elements which have come together in counsel’s presentation of the parents’ case in these proceedings. The local authority seeks to hold the parents’ solicitors responsible for this on the basis that they selected the particular counsel for these hearings. That submission is, in my view, not sustainable when it is clear, as it is, that the argument that became the focus of the application and was then sustained on to the second hearing was crafted by counsel and not by the solicitors. Mr X told the court that, following receipt of Professor Nussey’s report, the solicitors sought his advice on the future viability of the application for permission and that as a result of that advice the case continued. An indication of counsel’s faith in his clients’ case at the second hearing was the very surprising information, as reported to me during the hearing, that Mr X had approach Ms Delahunty outside court to enquire if the children’s guardian was going to support the application for permission to appeal.

My clear conclusion is that the manner in which the application for permission was pursued, after receipt of Professor Nussey’s report had removed from it any true validity, arose almost entirely from the wholly over optimistic judgment of counsel and not from any improper or unreasonable act or omission of the solicitors. By the end of the present hearing this understanding of events seemed to be shared by Mr Prest for the local authority when, after all of the submissions were complete, he made an application to include Mr X in the wasted costs application. I refused that application on the basis that the case had by then been heard and concluded on the basis that Mr X was not in the frame and that it would by that stage be oppressive to alter the focus of the application to include him.

Oh, I want to look at that again, let’s just do this one bit

Mr X is a brave and confident advocate who gives the strong impression of believing the cause for which he advocates. These various factors, high intellect, a lack of understanding of the justification for the approach taken in family proceedings and the brave championing of a cause, are, in my view, the unhelpful cocktail of elements which have come together in counsel’s presentation of the parents’ case in these proceedings

He was SO lucky to escape without a cost order.

It must have been fairly close as to whether the costs of the appeal hearing itself, were incurred as a result of advice which could not be sustained on the evidence. It was in part, I think, the fact that it was counsel’s clear advice and driving of the process that absolved the solicitors from blame in not abandoning their appeal once the expert they had instructed (and attempted to nobble) hadn’t supported them. If you can’t persuade an expert who you have blatantly tried to manipulate into supporting your case to support you, you really don’t have a winnable case and that would be the time to abandon the appeal. They didn’t. They pressed on. One can see from the previous blog and judgment just how much work went into that appeal hearing, particularly from leading counsel for the child, Ms Delahunty.

Of course, I could be wrong – perhaps the Mensa level intellect which counsel brought to bear in the case foresaw that as the Guardian and LA hadn’t included him in the wasted costs application, he could save his solicitors from a wasted costs order that was otherwise heading their way by convincing the Court that all of the faults were of his making. Perhaps he was nobly falling on his sword and was in reality blameless.

I would politely suggest that any counsel who are card-carrying members of Mensa to eschew the desire to flaunt this in front of the Court of Appeal in any future hearings.

[I’m sure 95% of Mensa members are witty, suave, urbane, good company, romantically successful, essentially happy, well-balanced, productive, helpful and fascinating, and that I have just been very unlucky in meeting the small proportion who spoil it for them…. I did also remove an “a bit like the American Express advert – it’s four letters too long” joke from this piece, but I’m sure you can work it out for yourselves]

If you are interested in instructing an overseas expert in care proceedings – perhaps you like paperwork, perhaps you enjoy the game of Russian Roulette that is incurring costs that the LSC might or might not underwrite, perhaps you just enjoy having telephone calls at 4.00am, there’s some guidance about how to do it, here :-

http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/JCO%2FDocuments%2FFJC%2Ffjc_guidelines_for_overseas_experts_Dec2011.pdf

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Posted in case law, costs, experts, fact finding and tagged an unhelpful cocktail, cost hearings in court of appeal, Court of Appeal, fact-finding, fairness, instructing an overseas expert, instruction of an expert, instruction of overseas expert, mensa, Re A (A child) 2013, rickets, wasted costs. Bookmark the permalink.

Letters of Destruction

Posted on February 1, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

You may well have heard that the new guidance on the instruction of experts came into force today. If it is actually enforced, it will significantly reduce the number of experts and at the same time significantly increase the amount of preparatory work prior to requesting the involvement of an expert.

The Ministry of Justice published a jolly and triumphal press release about it, here

http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/media/media-releases/2013/tighter-rules-introduced-on-expert-evidence-family-cases

“New rules come into force today which will mean judges can streamline proceedings in family courts by reducing the number of expert witnesses who have to give evidence.

Up to now, evidence from experts including psychologists, doctors and others would be heard if it was “reasonably required”. Now the judge will apply a tougher test and only allow the evidence if it is “necessary”.

The President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby, said:

“There is no question of families being denied the chance to call evidence they need to support their case or being denied a fair hearing. But the new test gives judges more control over expert evidence in family proceedings. The rule change gives family judges the means to make robust case management decisions to make sure the expert evidence is focused and relevant.”

“ This change underlines the key role of the court in determining what expert evidence it requires to help it reach the decisions in a case.

“This change is a vital component of the active judicial case management that will be needed to prepare the ground for the new Single Family Court, due to come into being in April 2014.”

The rules substitute a new Part 25 (Experts and Assessors) into the Family Procedure Rules and will apply to existing proceedings as well as those started after today’s date.

In addition, controlling the use of expert evidence has been added to Rule 1.4 of the Family Procedure Rules governing active case management.

The key changes to the existing Part 25 include:

a change to the test for permission to put expert evidence before the court from ‘reasonably required’ to ‘necessary’.
a list of factors to which the court is to have regard in reaching a decision whether to give permission, including the impact on the timetable and conduct of the proceedings and the cost of the expert evidence. Additional factors are specified in proceedings involving children. These include what other expert evidence is available, including any obtained before the start of proceedings, and whether the evidence could be obtained from another source, such as one of the parties or professionals already involved in the case;
in proceedings involving children, an application for permission to instruct an expert should state the questions which the expert is required to answer and, where permission is granted, the court will give directions specifying the questions that are to be put to the expert.”

I was interested in the very last bit – the Court approving the questions and setting them out in the order approving the instruction, because I wasn’t entirely sure that this claim was actually delivered in the changes, so have pressed a little further, and found that it IS, if the practice direction is followed (yeah, right) :-

http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/Resources/JCO/Documents/Practice%20Directions/family-div-procedure-rules-2010-practice-directions-amendments-consolidated-04122012.pdf

Well, it does seem, that if the Practice Direction is followed (ha!) then rather than coming to Court with a name of an expert and some timescales, there should be a proper application, accompanied by a draft order [my underlining]

3.11 FPR 25.7(2)(b) provides that a draft of the order giving the court’s permission as mentioned in FPR 25.4 is to be attached to the application for the court’s permission. That draft order must set out the following matters—

a) the issues in the proceedings to which the expert evidence is to relate and which the court is to identify; b) the questions relating to the issues in the case which the expert is to answer and which the court is to approve ensuring that they

(i) are within the ambit of the expert’s area of expertise;

(ii) do not contain unnecessary or irrelevant detail;

(iii) are kept to a manageable number and are clear, focused and direct; c) the party who is responsible for drafting the letter of instruction and providing

the documents to the expert; d) the timetable within which the report is to be prepared, filed and served; e) the disclosure of the report to the parties and to any other expert; f) the organisation of, preparation for and conduct of any experts’ discussion

(see Practice Direction 25E – Discussions between Experts in Family Proceedings); g) the preparation of a statement of agreement and disagreement by the experts following an experts’ discussion; h) making available to the court at an early opportunity the expert reports in electronic form;

i) the attendance of the expert at court to give oral evidence (alternatively, the expert giving his or her evidence in writing or remotely by video link), whether at or for the Final Hearing or another hearing; unless agreement about the opinions given by the expert is reached at or before the Issues Resolution Hearing (“IRH”) or, if no IRH is to be held, by a date specified by the court prior to the hearing at which the expert is to give oral evidence

And then also, it appear that the party seeking the instruction should send the draft order and questions in to the Court in advance of the hearing

Asking the court to settle the letter of instruction to a single joint expert

6.1 Where possible, the written request for the court to consider the letter of instruction referred to in rule 25.12(2) should be set out in an e-mail to the court and copied by e-mail to the other instructing parties. The request should be sent to the relevant court or (by prior arrangement only) directly to the judge dealing with the proceedings. In the magistrates’ court, the request should be sent to the relevant court or (by prior arrangement only) to any district judge (magistrates’ courts ) hearing the proceedings (and copied to the legal adviser) or to the legal adviser. The court will settle the letter of instruction, usually without a hearing to avoid delay; and will send (where practicable, by e-mail) the settled letter to the lead solicitor for transmission forthwith to the expert, and copy it to the other instructing parties for information.

Well, my first cynical take on this is that this simply won’t happen. There’s quite a lot of this that was already in the Practice Direction on Experts which everyone cheerfully ignored. It is that traditional Practice Direction stance of rather than making two or three solid suggestions that everyone can follow, that you introduce a blizzard of utterly unworkable schemes all at once to the point where everyone takes one look at it and concludes that it is best to just pretend the whole thing doesn’t exist.

If it IS going to happen, and that the Judge refuses any expert assessment where the request is not Practice Direction compliant [and that really depends on whether they are being sternly told behind the scenes that this is what they must do], then we are going to end up with an awful lot of adjourned CMCs, where we have to come back to Court and do it all again, only this time with reams of paperwork.

[If a party seeks an expert assessment, and doesn’t come with all of the paperwork and the CMC has to be adjourned, are they at risk of costs orders? Yet another reason for ducking being the lead on any assessment or proposed assessment]

If it IS going to happen, two major practice points arise. Firstly, the advocates meeting before the CMC would need to be happening much earlier than the two working days prior that it currently is (which in reality will just mean a later CMC). Secondly, whichever of the two parents lawyers decides to be the lead on the instruction of an expert, is going to have a huge amount of work in organising that instruction, far far more than at present, and their profitability (ha!) in the case probably immediately goes down the Swanee river.

So, if you are only looking for one expert, expect to see some quarrels at the advocates meeting about whether mother or father’s team should be the lead; as neither of them will really want to take on this burden.

[I also expect that counsel attending these advocates meetings will regularly find in their brief “under no circumstances agree to us being the lead on the expert” – we squabble about ‘who has to be the lead’ now, when very little is involved, but this is now a massive volume of work]

This may, cynically, be the way that the Government intend to reduce the number of experts – it hasn’t been possible to get the Courts to refuse assessments (being that they tend to follow the line of the Court of Appeal, which has been very pro-second-opinion), so they will just make it very very unattractive for those representing parents to actually make the applications.

So, watch this space for the first appeal from a Court who refuse an expert assessment because this Practice Direction has not been complied with.

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Posted in costs, experts, family justice modernisation and tagged expert, experts in care proceedings, instruction of experts, lead solicitor, letter of instruction, practice direction. Bookmark the permalink.

In England, justice is open to all, like the Ritz Hotel

Posted on January 28, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

Is there a difference in family justice provided to middle-class parents? A discussiony paranoidy rant…

As you may know, the title of this piece is drawn from a remark by an English Judge, Sir James Mathew and was made in the Victorian era. It is intentionally barbed.

It had quite a flurry of revival in popularity last year, as the Government debated and then implemented legal aid cuts that removed free legal advice from large chunks of the most vulnerable in society.

Private law

In terms of private law dispute, my initial question is likely to be true, sadly, as we go past April 2013. After that time, a parent who is denied contact is going to struggle to get their case off the ground and into court unless they are (a) literate (b) articulate or (c) a person of financial means. One might be cynical and say that the three things are interwoven, and that having three possibilities isn’t much use if they mostly capture the same group.

Of course, a person can represent themselves in court proceedings and a great many people do very well at it. (I’d recommend Lucy Reed’s book “Family Courts without a lawyer” for anyone who wants to do this http://www.amazon.co.uk/Family-Courts-without-Lawyer-Litigants/dp/0956777406/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359383824&sr=8-1 )

But even then, the litigant in person will either need to pay the Court fee for a contact application, which will be £200, or (if they are of limited means) navigate the byzantine system by which you can avoid paying the Court fee if you can satisfy an unsatisfiable bureaucracy of your entitlement to do so, a task which exhausts many private law solicitors who are well accustomed to trying.

[A bit like the Groucho Marx line that banks will lend money to people who can prove beyond doubt that they don’t need it]

Moving beyond that, you will as a wealthy or moderately wealthy person, have an option, a choice, which is denied to the non-middle class. You can decide whether to represent yourself or have a specialist used to navigating the courts, who speaks the same language as the judge, who can advise you. That’s a choice that won’t be open to someone who is not middle-class. [using middle-class as shorthand for someone who has a professional job which pays them average or better income, regardless of family background and such – of course there are plenty of plasterers who earn more than bank clerks. Perhaps the class debate is better expressed as ‘haves or have nots’ but is a shorthand for this piece]

If you are faced with allegations of violence or abuse, you won’t get a lawyer to represent you and defend you against them unless you have money. The other parent, the one making them, might well get a lawyer, even if the allegations are false.

More and more private law cases these days are descending into these sorts of allegations, and probably more and more will in the future, as the funding system says that making them gets you a lawyer, whereas defending yourself against allegations that you say are false, doesn’t.

Care proceedings

What about care proceedings though? The law says that if you are a parent and the State might be intervening in the way you bring up your child and might be contemplating your child no longer living with you, you would be entitled to free legal advice.

Everyone is on a level playing field then. Family justice is like the Ritz, it is open to everyone.

But how true is that, really?

Here are some names that you will have seen in care proceedings, often many times, if you work in this field – Zac, Jordan, Chantelle, Destiny.

Here are some names you have probably NEVER seen in care proceedings, Oliver, Crispin, Sophia, Harriet.

You might well say, and you’d be partially right, that a large tranche of care proceedings relate to neglect, and neglect in part springs from poverty. So, a middle-class family don’t face the same social problems as a poor family, since they have choices and options.

A middle-class parent who struggles with managing household tasks has an option to get a cleaner, or to have someone do the ironing, they don’t have to prioritise between food and electricity, or gas or a toy for their child.

I would argue that not all poor families end up neglecting their children, and that it is possible, and indeed the vast majority of poor families do it, to get their children brought up in clean, safe and loving environments despite a lack of resources.

But it is certainly true that you’re at far greater risk of living in neglect if money is very tight than if you are affluent.

[Subsequent to writing this, I came across an excellent blog post in Community Care on why more poverty does not mean more neglect :- http://www.communitycare.co.uk/blogs/childrens-services-blog/2013/01/poverty-does-not-equal-neglect-benefit-cuts-will-not-see-more-children-taken-into-care.html and is an interesting counterpoint to this debate. I don’t think we are miles apart, though I think if you increase the basic numbers of families in poverty, you may well increase the numbers of those families who don’t manage that sort of poverty well enough]

[This is reminding me of one of my favourite books, George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London”

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have
thought so much about poverty–it is the thing you have feared all your
life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, is
all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite
simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be
terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar LOWNESS of
poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the
complicated meanness, the crust-wiping….

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I
believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling
of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down
and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs–and well, here
are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off
a lot of anxiety.

I have been, in case you doubt, exceedingly poor, as both a child, and as an adult, and recognise what Orwell says, particularly in his passages about how when you are truly truly hungry, nothing else in the world much exists than that hunger, that preoccupation with food and filling your belly with something.

So, perhaps the care proceedings net doesn’t cast over the “Haves” because neglect isn’t much of an issue in the “Haves” world.

But what about violence, what about sexual abuse, what about alcohol abuse?

I’m fairly certain that the disease of alcoholism, and the effect that it has on parenting, is not a class issue – it can take anyone. In fact, I have worked, in the past, with people who drank a bottle of wine a night or more, and who would on that basis fail the sort of psychiatric examinations that we were sending parents to.

I have also encountered paedophiles from all walks of life – yes, very many were from damaged and impoverished backgrounds, but many others were teachers, professionals, doctors.

And I fail to believe that it is only poor people, only ‘common’ people, only ‘rough’ people, who reach the end of their tether, lose control and do something to a child that they should never have done.

There’s sort of a feeling, an unspoken one, in the Court rooms of this country, that child abuse is not done by people like us, that it belongs to a different world, another one, that we can look at, and judge, but not one that we truly belong in. There’s very little “there but for the grace of god” in child abuse cases.

As we know, and must remind ourselves, “The plural of anecdote is not data” and therefore it is of only limited (or indeed no) evidential value that most of the times I have seen parents with middle-class jobs, accents, bearing and relations, facing allegations of physical mistreatment of children, a reason has been found as to why the medical evidence is wrong, and why they can be exonerated.

Efforts seem, again anecdotally to me, to be found by a mixture of professionals (and again, I don’t claim that this is a conscious or deliberate action) to be more amenable to accepting that people like us couldn’t have done these dreadful things, than when similar things are alleged of people who live in a different sort of world to our own.

I don’t know how one could do the research on whether the outcomes for middle class parents are better for them than those for other parents – there’s no box on the application form for “Is the parent a bit posh?” or “Do they shop at Asda or Waitrose?” “Do they say napkin or serviette?” but I’d like to see some, if someone wants to set out to do it.

So there is at least the possibility of an unconscious bias of favouring or being more amenable to accepting the evidence given by people like us.

Can it go even further than that? To the overt stage, where actual cash, actual financial resources buys you a greater opportunity in a family case?

I don’t mind bribery, obviously. I don’t think that bribery plays any part in English justice. Call me naive if you want, I just honestly don’t believe that.

I had recently a conversation which prompted me to think about this piece, about a case (not one I was involved in, even tangentially and not necessarily a recent one) of suspected non-accidental injury, where the parents wanted to get a further piece of medical evidence, a fresh report. The Judge refused it, for good reasons about delay and proportionality.

The parents then pipe up that they could pay for the report themselves, rather than through legal aid, and lo and behold, there’s a reconsideration and the report is directed.

The justification, perhaps not unreasonably, is that the report is likely to be accelerated, expedited, on-time, if the expert knows that people are paying for it privately. So the delay might not be so long, and the expert report will probably not hold the case up so much. And of course, in the world we operate in, the Judge knows that the parents writing a cheque saves at least 2-3 weeks of messing around with the Legal Services Commission and prior authority, so the report probably will get done quicker.

Is that okay, or does that feel wrong?

It feels wrong to me that a person gets the chance to have a report not because of the merits of their case or the circumstances of the case, but because they, unlike someone else, can write a cheque and get it done.

[I couch all of this with the caveat that it wasn’t my case, I wasn’t there, I don’t know the detail – there may well have been very compelling reasons I am unaware of to have taken that course of action, but even just looking at it in the theoretical sense, would it be right in this hypothetical case below to allow the report?

Doctor says “I can do the report in 12 weeks, on public funding, but if it is paid for at my private rates, which are higher, I can do it in 5”

If the Judge was going to refuse the report on basis that 12 weeks delay was too long, should she allow it in 5, if the parents are able to pay for it privately? Or, is refusing it, if 5 weeks is considered reasonable delay, unfair just to preserve equality with some notional other parents who couldn’t pay the private fees?]

Can you go off and pay for your own expert without the Court’s permission?

Well, there have been some important decisions about that. Firstly, you need leave of the Court to give the papers to the expert, and then if you get leave of the court to instruct an expert, you have to cough up the report even if it is not favourable to you (unlike in crime) [Re L : A Minor : Police Investigation : Privilege 1996 1 FLR 731 and then Re V (Care Proceedings : Human Rights Claims 2004 1 FLR 944]

If you don’t get leave of the Court and go off and get the report anyway, it still has to be disclosed.

[If there are ongoing criminal proceedings, the parent can keep those reports secret and even refuse to say if there are any expert reports and who has written them, and can keep legal privilege when discussing those reports with their care lawyer S County Council v B 2000 2 FLR 161]

One clever way around this was tried in RE J (Application for shadow expert) 2008 1 FLR 1501

Where the applicant sought permission not to obtain a report that would have to be disclosed whether it was positive or negative, but instead an expert to basically advise the lawyer and formulate good questions for cross-examination and be a sounding board for the barrister’s theories.

The Court felt that this was not appropriate and would not be granted. And of course, it would only have been a course open to someone paying for the report privately.

Can you get a better barrister by paying money?

A parent relying on a barrister who is being paid with public funding (or what all sane people call “Legal Aid”) will get proper advice, from someone who works hard and does their best and is bright. All barristers who have experience in care proceedings do legal aid work, so you can’t get some better barrister, better advice by paying privately. There’s not a Premier League of barristers who know about care but don’t do legal aid work.

I would NOT, for a second, suggest that the average barrister works harder or better on a case that they are earning more money on, I don’t think money comes into it. Honestly, I don’t.

But what you can get, potentially, is a QC. If you are willing to pay for it, you can get a QC in a case that the LSC (legal services commission, or what sane people call the legal aid board) would not let you have one for free.

That QC is the best of the best, and may give you an edge in the case. Though some barristers who don’t have QC after their name are better advocates than some QCs, in general, a QC is going to be better.

It may well send a subliminal message to the Court about your case and the quality of it. Certainly there’s always an impression that the Court treats a QC with more respect than a run of the mill advocate.

Or you may not even need to go that far. Suppose you think about your barrister doing your case for public funding – they will work hard at your case, and put in effort. But they have another case the week before where they are doing that, and another the week after.

Might you get better representation from the same barrister, if you were willing to pay them to take two or three days off the week before your case to prepare?

We can’t know for certain, but I’d suggest that we all work better when we’re not shattered.

That’s an option available to those who have money that doesn’t exist for those who don’t.

Ring your solicitor up and say “I think my barrister should really only work on my case and nothing else the week before the hearing”, and you’ll get this answer if you have no money “That’s a nice idea, but I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that” – and if you have lots of money, this answer “They don’t normally do that, but we could see if they would – it would be very expensive though, you’d be paying for seven days of their time instead of five. Do you want me to speak to them about it?”

So, is English family justice really like the Ritz, or am I just crackers?

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Posted in costs, experts, research and tagged alcoholism, can you get an expert without permission? Can you pay for your own expert in care proceedings?, can you keep an expert report secret, child abuse, do people with money get treated better in care proceedings? can you buy better barristers with money? shadow expert, down and out in paris and london, fairness, instructing an expert in secret, middle class parents and child abuse, neglect, poverty. Bookmark the permalink.

When to apply for prior authority (and how long the LSC thinks assessments take)

Posted on January 21, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

There has finally been some guidance published about this vexed issue. You may recall previous anguished blogs by me about this, most particularly that the last system (“don’t apply for prior authority as it will be refused, and we may arbitrarily slash the number of hours we will pay you for, but you won’t know that until the expert has actually invoiced you”) wasn’t really that workable if you factored in that (a) experts actually wanted to be paid and (b) solicitors actually wanted to get the money to pay them from the LSC, rather than out of their own pocket. Selfish of both of them, I know.

http://www.justice.gov.uk/legal-aid/newslatest-updates/civil-news/prior-authorities-for-experts-in-family-cases?dm_i=4P,18921,AV9ZJ,45QDV,

1 The LSC’s Standard Civil Contract states that there is a contractual right to seek or obtain prior authority only where: • the rate sought exceeds the codified rates introduced in October 2011, or • the item of costs is unusual in its nature or is unusually large. The guidance includes: • examples of factors that may indicate exceptional circumstances apply • benchmarks of ‘unusual’ hours below which prior authority should not be sought • ranges of hours within which prior authority applications have typically been granted for psychologists and psychiatrists, which represent the most commonly used expert types • details of expert witness information required on detailed assessment.

The guidance also confirms that prior authority is not necessary in relation to drug and alcohol tests – provided that the tests carried out reflect what has been directed in a court order. Case-by-case assessments ‘Typical’ hours outlined in the guidance are not caps. They are intended to help providers make case-by-case assessments about when they can submit prior authority applications. Prior authority itself is not a limit on the number of hours that may be carried out by an expert. Additional expert work hours may be justified on assessment, at the end of the case, to the relevant assessing authority. This may be either the LSC or the court

You are probably already spotting the gap in this new guidance. There is no sentence anywhere that suggests that the solicitor will get paid in full by the LSC for any expert report that comes within hourly rates and the benchmark number of hours. So there is still an element of uncertainty and risk. Hoorah.

But at least we now have the secret benchmarking of hours that the LSC claim to have been using. (I strongly suspect that the actual policy was just ‘cut them in half’, but I am a nasty cynical piece of work and that is just my own opinion based on lots of anecdotal observation)

They consider costs of more than £5000 per funded client to be unusual and need prior authority.

The hours above which prior authority should be applied for are:-

Pscychologist (including child psychologist) 20 hours (for one party) 30 hours (for more)

Pscyhiatrist (including child psychiatrist) 15 hours (for one party) 25 (for more)

Independent social worker 30 hours (for one party) 40 (for more)

Radiologist (10 hours)

These benchmarks include all aspects of expert service provision and not just the assessment of parties An item of costs is unusual in nature where, for example, more than 2 parties are to be assessed. The number of hours allowed on prior authority is not a cap on the work that may be done, it is authority for an amount of work based on the known relevant facts of a case at a particular time. Providers are always able to seek to justify on assessment/taxation why a greater number of hours were required

Hmmm, interesting. I’m not sure which psychologists they have identified who can read two lever arch files, assess a parent, prepare a report, possibly attend an experts meeting AND Come to Court to give evidence in under 20 hours, to establish that this is a reasonable level. [Given that most experts a year back were estimating 35 hours to WRITE the report, which I know was egregious padding and part of why they’ve been cut off at the knees, 20 hours seems very low.]

I am also a bit puzzled as to why a paediatric report, which is generally about a tenth of the size gets 75% of the hours, and why it takes an ISW 50% longer to assess a parent than a psychologist.

Also I am intrigued as to how radiologists in many of the cases I have blogged about in 2012 could be expected to have done all of the necessary work in 10 hours.

The guidance also clears up once and for all that Independent Social Workers will only get £30 per hour. You may be aware that there was a separate hourly rate of £65 per hour for “risk assessment” and many had simply attempted to switch over to that. You won’t be able to claim for “risk assessment” now in any cases that aren’t sexual abuse. [This is going to be very problematic for the important role of conducting assessments following findings of serious physical abuse, which is a very specialised piece of work and will now be either £30 an hour or farmed out to expensive and less timeous psychologists]

The Ministry of Justice and the Legal Services Commission have published guidance on how expert services identified as specialist risk assessments will be paid. The guidance highlights the factors that may arise in a case which would point to it being appropriate to pay the risk assessment rate.

Factors that may typically point to the expert service being that of a specialist risk assessment expert include where:

a. The court order specifies that a risk assessment is required; and

b. The work to be done is over and above that requiring independent social work expertise, for example where: • There is a substantiated criminal allegation relevant to the case in the immediate background of the case (such as a conviction or pending proceedings for a sex offence); and • A finding of sexual abuse relevant to the case has been made by a court

c.the report is specifically required to address the risk posed as a result of the above factors.

The guidance also clarifies that in considering claims where independent social work services are provided in non-family matters the LSC will have regard to the rates set out in Community Legal Service (Funding) (Amendment No2) Order 2011. Where there is no comparable rate in the funding order – for example for a social worker providing social work services – the LSC will have regard to the comparable rates for independent social work services in family matters introduced in May 2011.

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Posted in costs, experts and tagged benchmarking for hours, expert fees, experts in care proceedings, hourly rates, independent social worker, LSC, paying experts, prior authority, psychiatrist, psychologist, radiologist, when to apply for prior authority. Bookmark the permalink.

If you must Hague, don’t be vague

Posted on December 27, 2012 by suesspiciousminds

The “too long, didn’t read” version – if you’re making an application in the High Court under the Child Abduction and Custody Act 1985, bring your chequebook. And if you’re doing that, and are listed before the Honourable Mr Justice Charles, ring your bank manager first.

A discussion of the decision in the High Court of B v A 2012

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2012/3127.html

As readers of the blog will know, I often lavish praise on High Court Judges. I am fond of High Court Judges who have admirable qualities, such as clarity of thought, beautiful construction of sentences, being able to illuminate a difficult point with a clever analogy, or who are fundamentally kind and appreciate the human dynamics of the cases that appear before them.

I am not afraid of distributing praise in those circumstances – I would say fulsome praise, but I am mindful of the words of Inigo Montoya (no, not, “my name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!” – the other one) “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”

Don’t ever say fulsome if you mean generously complimentary…. Or at least, not to a word-geek.

Anyway, this judgment is by the Honourable Mr Justice Charles and is bloody important for anyone who deals with abduction cases, both solicitors and counsel.

It would be fair to say that he was irked during the course of this judgment. He considered that insufficient care had been given both to the very serious nature of the application for a location order and to involve the tipstaff, and moreover to the inherent risks of doing so where the initial application was made ex parte, and the facts laid out before the Court were both partial and potentially partisan.

The Judge begins by setting out the reasons why making such orders is extremely serious

Tipstaff orders, and thus location orders, are (and are designed to be) powerful weapons in the search for children and the determination by the courts of England and Wales of issues relating to their future. They enable public authorities to interfere in the private lives of adults and children and carry serious penalties. It should be known to all judges who grant them that experience has shown that:

i) the travelling time of a flight to England can often allow for steps to be taken to meet the relevant adult and child at the airport on arrival,

ii) the orders can often be triggered when an adult comes to the notice of the police for some other reason (e.g. a motoring offence), and

iii) these possible triggers to an order mean that care needs to be taken to ensure that their enforcement (and so possibly an arrest and detention under them) only remains a possibility for as long as they are needed to fulfil their purpose.
The potentially serious impact of such orders means that those who apply for them and those who grant them should act with caution and due regard to the principles and procedures relating to the grant of relief on a without notice basis (see for example Young v Young [2012] 2 FLR 470 at paragraph 26 (ii) to (v). That case related to a passport order in a case seeking a financial remedy but the same approach is required to a case relating to the alleged abduction of a child or other proceedings relating to a child).

Nothing at all to disagree with there.

The Judge was perturbed that an application had been made that was not constructed as well as it ought to have been. He reminded the applicant’s counsel of a valuable previous authority B Borough Council v S & Anor [2006] EWHC 2584 (Fam) dealing specificially with how inappropriate it was for these applications to be made without notice without a great deal of care.

General comment on without notice applications

37. There is a natural temptation for applicants to seek, and courts to grant, relief to protect vulnerable persons whether they are children or vulnerable adults. In my view this can lead (and experience as the applications judge confirms that it does lead) to practitioners making without notice applications which are not necessary or appropriate, or which are not properly supported by appropriate evidence. Also there is in my view a general practice of asking the court to grant without notice orders over a fairly extended period with express permission to apply to vary or discharge on an inappropriately long period of notice (often 48 hours). It seems to me that on occasions this practice pays insufficient regard to the interests of both the persons in respect of whom and against whom the orders are made, and that therefore on every occasion without notice relief is sought and granted the choice of the return date and the provisions as to permission to apply should be addressed with care by both the applicants and the court. Factors in that consideration will be an estimation of the effect on the person against whom the order is made of service of the order and how that is to be carried out.

38. Inevitably on a without notice application the court hears from only the applicant. Good practice, fairness and indeed common sense demand that on any such application the applicant should provide the court with:

i) a balanced, fair and particularised account of the events leading up to the application and thus of the matters upon which it is based. In many cases this should include a brief account of what the applicant thinks the respondent’s case is, or is likely to be,

ii) where available and appropriate, independent evidence,

iii) a clear and particularised explanation of the reasons why the application is made without notice and the reasons why the permission to apply to vary or discharge the injunction granted should be on notice (rather than immediately or forthwith as in the standard collection and location orders) and why the return date should not be within a short period of time. As to that I accept and acknowledge that a reference to notice being given if practicable, or for a short period of notice (say 2 working hours or just two hours if a week end or holiday period is imminent), may often provide an appropriate balance to avoid a sequence of effectively without notice applications, and that in some cases a longer period of notice may be appropriate, and

iv) in many cases an account of the steps the applicant proposes concerning service, the giving of an explanation of the order and the implementation of an order. This is likely to be of particular importance in cases such as this one where emotional issues are involved and family members of a person who lacks capacity are the subject of the injunctions and orders. In such cases, as here, information as to those intentions are likely to inform issues as to the need for, and the proportionality of, the relief sought and granted

39. As to point (ii) I pause to mention that in my view it is surprising and disappointing how many times a without notice application for relief is made in the Family Division based only on largely unparticularised assertions by one side of serious allegations without any third party material to support them, or more generally the basis for the relief sought. I appreciate that in many instances there is a very real urgency and there will not be third party evidence of allegations of abusive behaviour that are readily available but in others there will be. A classic example, which occurs regularly, is that an applicant who seeks a return of children to his or her care fails to provide any third party evidence (e.g. from a school, a GP or records in their possession) to confirm that he or she is indeed the primary carer of the relevant children.

40. Guidance has often been given on the information to be provided and the procedure to be followed in seeking without notice relief (see at first instance Re S (a child) (ex parte orders) [2001] 1 WLR 211, [2000] 3 FCR 706, W v H (ex parte injunctions) [2000] 3 FCR 481 (by analogy X Council v B (Emergency Protection Orders) [2005] 1 FLR 341 and Re X (Emergency Protection Orders) [2006] EWHC 510 (Fam)) and in the Court of Appeal Moat Housing v Harris [2005] 2 FLR 551 in particular at paragraphs 63 to 69, and see also the notes to CPR Part 25 and the practice note now reported at [2006] 2 FLR 354).

41. Naturally I endorse that guidance and do not seek to add to it save to emphasise the points made above and to record my own observations that practitioners (a) too regularly do not follow and implement that guidance, and (b) by such failure show an insufficient appreciation of the exceptional nature of without notice relief and the impact it has (or potentially has) on the rights, life and emotions of the persons against whom it is granted.

42. As to this I acknowledge that the courts must take part of the blame for such failures by granting relief without notice in cases when (a) the guidance has not been followed, and (b) the impact on the person against whom the relief is granted could be considerable.

43. I add that additionally there is a need (a) to comply strictly with undertakings given at the time the order is made, and (b) to keep full and proper records of what is put before the court and said to the court. This should include a record of the times of the hearing so that a transcript can be more easily obtained. The availability of a transcript does not however reduce the duty of those applying for without notice relief to keep a full record of what the court was shown and was told.

Having quoted those passages, the Judge then indicated that he fully agreed with them and added to them

16. As well as endorsing the guidance set out above, there are three additional comments I would make:

(1) If information is put before the court to substantiate a without notice order, it should be the subject of the closest scrutiny and, if the applicant is not present in person to verify it, be substantiated by production of a contemporaneous note of the instructions. If that is not available, there may need to be a short adjournment to enable steps to be taken to verify the information relied upon.

(2) If additional information is put before the court orally, there must be a direction for the filing of sworn evidence to confirm the information within a very short period of time. If that direction had not been made in this case, the passport order would have been executed when the grounds for obtaining it were simply not there. That would have involved a gross breach of the defendant’s rights, quite apart from the court having been given misleading information.

(3) Lastly, leaving the scrutiny that the court should give to without notice applications to one side, it is incumbent on those advising whether such an application is justified to consider rigorously whether an application is justified and be clear as to the evidential basis for it.”

All very good points, I have been on the other end of a number of ex parte applications, and when you come to Court and outline what the other side of the story is, you often see the Judge’s expression become “Well, if I had known THAT…”

And these applications are of course, an immensely serious interference with someone’s liberty and free movement, and it is therefore important that a great deal of care is taken, both by the advocate presenting the case and by the tribunal determining it.

The long and short of this case was that the applicant’s representatives ended up not just not getting the order, but with something far, far, far worse than that. Probably the worst outcome you can ever get if you send counsel off to Court to make an application.

As mentioned in B Borough Council v S, I recognise that there is a natural temptation for applicants to seek, and for courts to grant, relief to protect the vulnerable, and, I add, to find children who it is alleged have been abducted. But this temptation, and the strong public interest in granting such relief, does not provide an excuse for failures to apply the correct approach in law to such applications. Indeed, if anything, the strong public interest in providing such relief and its impact on the subjects of the relief and their families mean that the correct approach in law should be followed and so the sound reasons for it, based on fairness, should be observed. Naturally this applies to all without notice applications, but it can be said to have particular importance when Tipstaff orders are sought and granted because they can found a deprivation of liberty without further court involvement, and they do restrict freedom of movement.

In my view, a practice of granting and continuing Tipstaff orders in Hague Convention cases as a matter of course and without insisting on properly prepared, particularised and updating evidence is to be deprecated.

AND

It seems to me that if such failures are to be avoided in the future there is a need for judges:

i) to refuse to make without notice orders if the established principles and procedures are not applied (I and some other judges do this), and

ii) to treat such failures as negligent and thus as a foundation for the exercise of discretion to make a wasted costs order.

Sadly, the first course alone has not resulted in general improvement and it is to be hoped that when the second course is added it will. But, I acknowledge and confirm that this promotional effect is not a ground for making the order rather it is a potential product of making such an order applying the approach set out in Ridehalgh.

And more chillingly for advocates

Generally, a litigant has to take the consequences of such behaviour and look to his advisers for recompense but I have concluded that the application for costs against him should be refused, because:

i) the point that the shortcomings in the presentation of his case by his advisers is a reflection of endemic failures of family practitioners and courts means that his conduct should not be categorised and reprehensible or beyond the band of what is reasonable (see paragraph 80 hereof), and

ii) the policy and merits arguments referred to in paragraphs 82 to 84 support no such order being made.

Thus it wasn’t the client who was going to be hit for costs, but rather his representatives

Also, in my view:

i) the merits and policy arguments referred to in paragraphs 82 to 84 above, and

ii) the point that the father’s solicitors are unfortunate to be singled out when their failures to comply with the principles and procedures relating to without notice applications are widespread in the Family Division and were not picked up by a number of judges, warrant reductions in the costs to be awarded as wasted costs.

Taking the above into account, in respect of the costs schedule up to the hearing on 10 September 2012, I make a wasted costs order against the father’s solicitors in the sum of £18,000 (to include VAT).

The Judge had actually knocked quite a bit off the costs to reflect that this was a warning shot across the bows and that the particular advocates involved had not been worse in their failings than many other cases. But implicit in that is “woe betide”

I suspect that there may well be some family barristers who are having gentle chats with their clerks about whether the cab rank rule means that they need to take cases where they are liable to be personally stung for costs of £18,000 plus, and frantic calls to the RCJ list office to determine tribunals might well be being made.

I do wonder also whether sufficient weight has been given here to the very nature of the applications – a parent believes their child has been abducted, the child is missing, information is sketchy and develops piecemeal, and often the most strikingly important details emerge during the course of the day and are not necessarily reduced to affidavit form in advance. I also wonder how much better such cases will be presented in the High Court when those advocates who are skilled and accomplished at presenting them no longer want to bear the personal risk of doing so…

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Posted in case law, costs and tagged B v A 2012, child abduction, child abduction and custody act, cost order, counsel to pay costs, hague convention, high court, location order, solicitor to pay costs, tipstaff, wasted costs, what you do not smell is iocaine powder. Bookmark the permalink.

Practice directions make perfect?

Posted on October 5, 2012 by suesspiciousminds

Gosh, this is an insanely bloggy week. Some consultation documents for new family law practice directions have flitted across my inbox today. I read them, so you don’t have to…

There are three big ones

One on experts pre-proceedings, which is obviously going to become more and more pertinent as the Government move the goalposts to artificially reduce the timescales for Court proceedings , sorry ‘shift the assessment process to pre-proceedings’. It seems to me eminently sensible – there should be a proper LOI, documents shown to the expert should be particularised, and the expert should be told that they are to treat themselves and the assessment in exactly the same way as if it were being done within proceedings.

One on the Official Solicitor, which is jawdropping.

1.1 The court will investigate as soon as possible any issue as to whether an adult party or intended party to family proceedings lacks capacity (within the meaning of the Mental Capacity Act 2005) to conduct the proceedings. An adult who lacks capacity to act as a party to the proceedings is a protected party and must have a litigation friend to conduct the proceedings on their behalf. The expectation of the Official Solicitor is that the Official Solicitor will only be invited to act for the protected party as litigation friend if there is no other person suitable or willing to act.

1.2 Any issue as to the capacity of an adult to conduct the proceedings must be determined before the court gives any directions relevant to that adult’s role in the proceedings.

We all know that this has been the direction of travel for the Official Solicitor for some time – they simply can’t cope with the volume of cases that have come their way. But this is a recognition in a Practice Direction that for most cases, a person lacking capacity will have to instruct solicitors through a friend or member of their family.

No prospect for difficulties there. There’s never anything massively sensitive within care proceedings about an adult that might not be appropriate to share with their family member. There’s never any conflict between family members and any shifting allegiances or falling out. And there’s never any conflict of interest between say a mother who wants to fight for her child, and the grandmother who is now instructing the mother’s representatives but who actually wants the child to live with her (grandmother) rather than the mother.

I can see that in some quarters, John Hemming MP for one, it might be thought desirable to take the Official Solicitor out of the picture, and have the family help the parent to give instructions to a solicitor, rather than have some remote figure of the State make those decisions. I have some sympathy with that, and think that it is a perfectly legitimate subject for debate and if it is after scrutiny found to be BETTER to have the family do it than the State, then make the change.

But what’s happening here is a dramatic shift in public policy from “where a person is incapable of instructing a solicitor, someone independent should represent their best interests” to “anyone suitable in the family can instruct a solicitor on the parents behalf”, not as a result of debate, or research, or analysis, but because the current workload is too much.

Just as we massively scaled down the role of Guardians because CAFCASS was overstretched (and look what that did – ushered in an era of getting three or four experts on every case, delaying and obfuscating and costing the country), we’re making the same error here. Instead of properly resourcing the Official Solicitor, we’re just abandoning the principle.

I am mystified as to what a parent’s representative is supposed to do, faced with a capacity certificate saying the parent can’t give instructions, and two competing people who want to be the litigation friend. The solicitor can’t chose, the client can’t chose. How do you resolve that? What if the papers you’ve seen show that the person being put forward as the litigation friend failed to protect the client as a child and is largely responsible for the mess the client now finds themselves in as an adult?

The third one is on the instruction of experts within proceedings. Everyone follows the current practice direction on experts slavishly, as we know, so a fresh one is bound to fix any problems.

Here’s the gist of it – try to go for single jointly agreed experts rather than going off to get one each, as if we were in 1980s civil litigation.

Well, we already do. Ah, but now they have an acronym SJE (Single Joint Expert) so that is going to make all the difference.

The Practice Direction does clarify that telling a prospective expert something at all about the case so that they can (a) tell you whether it is the sort of thing they can do (b) when they can do it by and (c) how much they would like to be paid for it, knowing full well that the estimate they give is subject to the whim of the LSC, is definitely not a contempt of Court.

[That is of course, helpful – but given that the Practice Direction is not in force yet, raises the unfortunate spectre that if it is necessary to have a change in law to make sure that doing that WON’T be a contempt of court in the future, that it sort of is now?]

And then what will be necessary in the application for an expert – underlining is mine.

an application or the court’s permission to call an expert or put in evidence an expert’s report, for an expert to be instructed or for the child to be medically or psychiatrically examined or otherwise assessed for the purpose of obtaining expert evidence for use in the proceedings must state-—

(a) the discipline, qualifications and expertise of the expert (by way of C.V. where possible);

(b) the expert’s availability to undertake the work;

(c) the timetable for the report;

(d) the responsibility for instruction;

(e) whether the expert evidence can properly be obtained by only one party (for example, on behalf of the child);

(f) why the expert evidence proposed cannot properlybe given by an officer of the service, Welsh family proceedings officer or the local authority (social services undertaking a core assessment) in accordance with their respective statutory duties or any other party to the proceedings or an expert already instructed in the proceedings;

(g) the likely cost of the report on an hourly or other charging basis;

(h) the proposed apportionment (at least in the first instance) of any jointly instructed expert’s fee; when it is to be paid; and, if applicable, whether public funding has been approved.

And then what is to go into the order – note that it is going to be necessary to append the questions so that the Court can determine that they are kept to a manageable number and are clear and focussed. That’s good news for solicitors, since it means an end to the interminable tedium of back and forth emailing about questions and the questions being settled by counsel at Court.

I think that this is a GOOD thing. It will mean that CMC’s will take substantially more court time than previously, as the questions will have to be drafted before an order can be lodged.

The terms of the draft order to be attached to the application for the court’s permission

3.8 FPR 25.7 provides that a draft of the order giving the court’s permission mentioned in FPR 25.4 is to be attached to the application for the court’s permission. That draft order must set out the following matters—

a) the issues in the proceedings to which the expert evidence is to relate and which the court is to identify;

b) the questions relating to the issues in the case which the expert is to answer and which the court is to approve ensuring that they

(i) are within the ambit of the expert’s area of expertise;

(ii) do not contain unnecessary or irrelevant detail;

(iii) are kept to a manageable number and are clear, focused and direct;

c) the party who is responsible for drafting the letter of instruction and providing the documents to the expert;

d) the timetable within which the report is to be prepared, filed and served;

e) the disclosure of the report to the parties and to any other expert;

f) the organisation of, preparation for and conduct of any experts’ discussion (see Practice Direction 25E – Discussions between Experts in Family Proceedings);

g) the preparation of a statement of agreement and disagreement by the experts following an experts’ discussion;

h) making available to the court at an early opportunity the expert reports in electronic form;

I think the two on experts are fine, and the one on the representation of vulnerable adults who lack capacity is awful.

It looks as though the plan is for these Practice Directions to come in some time before the end of this year. Sadly, the consultation process is over before I ever saw the documents, such is life. I doubt my snarky mutterings would have made any difference anyway.

And in the words of Meat Loaf – two out of three ain’t bad.

1 Comment

Posted in consultation, costs, experts, family justice modernisation and tagged adult without capacity, expert pre-proceeding, instruction of experts, letter of instruction, litigation friend, official solicitor, practice direction. Bookmark the permalink.

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