Monitoring legal services

SLAB has arrangements in place to monitor legal services by:

• Analysing the organisation’s data on trends in legal assistance and supply
• Supplementing this with other sources of data about legal services including information that may be requested of the Law Society of Scotland, the Faculty of Advocates and the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service;
• Seeking the views of stakeholders, including service providers and users.
  • Where possible, in order to gain insight into access to legal services, SLAB will convene groups of specialist organisations with specific interests and expertise in the topics being assessed for discussion.

The topics chosen for assessment under monitoring duty are based on identifying those areas of law which are either:

• anticipated to be at the potentially highest risk of problems; and/or
• those in which legal aid plays a substantial role; and/or
• directly relevant to the broader policy issues of the day, so as to maximise the relevance of SLAB’s monitoring work to a range of stakeholders.

This is a new approach to how SLAB monitors legal services. In 2017, SLAB’s approach was updated to the model above, in order to ensure the maximum utility of SLAB’s monitoring work.

SLAB’s methods in preparing the first five monitoring reports previously included consultation with a more broad-ranging, fixed group of stakeholders (the Access to Justice Reference Group) and took a more over-arching rather than targeted approach to identifying the areas of law for assessment.

For more information on this work please contact John Osborne, Policy Projects Manager, on 0131 240 1889 or osbornejo@slab.org.uk.