Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31LocalGovernmentLawyer Dispute Resolution 2016 15 tipping point where, with budget cuts, using outside counsel is not so cost- effective,” said David Wong, Litigation Solicitor at the London Borough of Bexley. “So in one or two areas, such as SEN advocacy, we have taken the work back in-house even at the cost of hiring a lawyer because the cost benefits [make sense]. There’s a sea-change there and we may see a sharp drop in external expenditure in the future.” Delegates reported, however, that it can still be a battle to convince client departments of the benefits of using in- house lawyers – there is still a perception that barristers are “cleverer and more skilled”. Heather Stevens, a barrister at Mid Kent Legal Services who practised at the Bar until 2014 before moving into local government, said that, in her experience, prosecuting cases in-house had delivered real benefits. “It has enabled the officers to take many more cases to court knowing that I could deal with trials and keep costs down. It has encouraged officers to take cases all the way, although we still use counsel for more specialist areas such as planning.” As ever, resourcing the larger, labour- intensive disputes remains a headache, particularly for small and medium-sized teams. “We tend to have to use counsel more because we simply don’t have the time to deal with them in-house,” reported Jayne Bolas, Team Leader (Contentious) at Mid Kent Legal Services. “Until recently, we had three and a half people to deal with everything litigious for three boroughs. As soon as you get hit by an unexpected judicial review or a traveller camp arrives on a Friday afternoon, everything else goes out of the window.” Getting the right structure Successfully making the case for additional staff – to handle more advocacy in-house – is of course not easy at a time of cutbacks elsewhere in the authority. Delegates at the roundtable nevertheless stressed that having the right departmental structure is essential if the demands on legal services teams are to be met. And these demands are still growing, in part because the more senior staff in client departments have often accepted redundancy or been restructured out, taking their knowledge and experience with them. “While lawyers can often get the best result for the council, instructing officers are often not interested in compromising even though the costs may outweigh the benefits.” Tim Briton, Gateshead Council The wisdom of crowds? What connects the Wireless R&B music festival in Finsbury Park, a proposed cruise liner terminal at Greenwich, a ‘Formula E’ race track in Battersea, fracking in Lancashire, and wind turbines in a Devon estuary? The answer is that claimants have used crowd funding to enable them to challenge in the courts decisions taken by local authorities, central government and others. The most high-profile fundraising site – and the source of funds for the cases mentioned above – is Crowd Justice (www.crowdjustice.co.uk). Set up in 2014 by Julia Salasky, a former lawyer at international law firm Linklaters and the United Nations, the site has tapped into a willingness among members of the public to back cases. The sums involved are often small in order to kick start a case but claimants have also been able to return and set ‘stretch targets’ running into tens of thousands of pounds, in a bid to cover the costs of later stages in proceedings. In one case, the dispute over Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s controversial decision to impose a contract on junior doctors, some £150,000 was raised in short order. In a departure for the platform, Crowd Justice has also raised funds to back a project – Ipswich and Suffolk Council for Racial Equality’s 'Tackling Discrimination in the East' scheme – rather than an individual legal action. Against this backdrop we asked respondents what effect they thought crowd funding might have on their authorities. One in seven (14%) predicted a major effect, while 65% thought it would be minor. Just one in five (21%) suggest there will be no effect. “I think it is too early to say but I have concerns at what those who provide ‘crowd-funding’ expect to gain for themselves,” says one respondent. Asked what kind of disputes they thought crowd-funding was likely to be used for, heads of legal and senior disputes lawyers predicted challenges in the planning and environmental and education arenas, as well when an authority seeks to implement a major change in policy. Although the number of crowd-funded cases is likely to remain relatively small, these disputes will often be resource- intensive and put the public body concerned firmly in the spotlight. “We have had a number of judicial review challenges from the same group of people who are very savvy with social media,” Jayne Middleton- Albooye, Head of Legal Services at the London Borough of Enfield told delegates at the roundtable. “Whenever we introduce a policy that is not popular, they have a huge groundswell of support.” Crowd-funded challenges involving the council have included legal action over the introduction of additional selective licensing, and more recently its plans for ‘Cycle Enfield’. Not that the funding of disputes in this way is necessarily a negative development. “It allows people to think of interesting challenges to the law,” Middleton-Albooye told the roundtable. “They [the claimants] can go off, get some legal advice and test things without being exposed themselves. In one sense, from a lawyer’s perspective, it means you come across things you’ve never thought of before.”