A sadly familiar crisis in legal aid funding. A familiar (but not nearly so dire) shortage of jobs for new law grads. And a thought-provoking solution from a Toronto lawyer, that highlights the differences in how our two countries credential lawyers and provide legal service to the poor:
I propose the following: Structure payment from legal aid to enable small criminal and immigration firms to earn more money with a student than they would without a student, i.e. setting aside a portion that could only be billed if a student were employed by that firm. This would enable the lawyer to bill more if he used a student than if he or she did not do so.
For example, a lawyer can bill to a maximum of a certain amount for a simple assault case, but can earn that same amount plus 20 per cent if 20 per cent of the work was done by a student-at-law.
If we structured legal aid payments in that way, with a sufficiently large amount attached to the “articling student bonus,” we could ensure that the discretionary portion of legal aid income of the average criminal or immigration lawyer is sufficiently large that the cost of the articling student would be in large part financed by the ordinary lawyer’s legal aid billings.
In turn, this would mean that more legal aid work would be done; more poor people would be served; and more articling students who aspire to work in criminal defence and immigration law would be properly trained in the traditional way.
Clearly, the attorney general would have to be brought on side for such a proposal. But delivering legal services by an articling student under the supervision of a private lawyer is more economical than the present system which makes it impossible for students to be involved at all and simply ensures that fewer and fewer people needing trials get monetary assistance from the government.
