ACSeS opts for CIPFA scheme to benchmark legal departments

The Association of Council Secretaries and Solicitors (ACSeS) has decided to participate in the benchmarking scheme run by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA).

ACSeS currently runs its own scheme to benchmark best practice across local government in conducting legal functions. However, it has now chosen to adopt the CIPFA scheme.

Explaining the decision in Local Government Lawyer this week, the association’s president, Mirza Ahmad, said the CIPFA scheme “was used for a spectrum of different services, and was more widely distributed and therefore understood within local government”.

Ahmad, who is Corporate Director of Governance at Birmingham City Council, added that the output data for legal services would be more meaningful to key authority members and officers.

CIPFA runs a number of benchmarking clubs to help participants pinpoint areas of good or poor performance. These cover a large number of areas of local authority activity, including accountancy, audit, human resources, insurance, children’s social care and adult social care.

Its legal services benchmarking club is now in its second year. According to CIPFA, this club produces a questionnaire and report that focuses on four main types of comparison:

• Cost of legal services – fee earners, support staff and other direct and indirect costs – plus legal costs bought-in or incurred outside the central services, and net of income and costs recovered. These costs are compared in relation to the size of each authority as measured by their population or by their financial turnover
• Workload – cases and charged hours – split by type of work and by type of client
• Staffing – numbers, qualifications and pay
• Working practices, eg charge-out rates, charging systems, legal software and so on.

For upper-tier authorities, there is also a separate section dealing with child care proceedings.

In his article Ahmad also covered a range of other issues, including ACSeS’s first leadership summit, Standards for England issues and research into the relationship between chief executives and chief legal officers.