Four resign over scathing legal report

A scathing report into the state of legal aid has resulted in a cleanout of the Legal Services Agency (LSA) board.

The resignations of chairwoman Carol Durbin and board members Jane Taylor, Alister James and Dr Pare Keiha resignations were accepted by Justice Minister Simon Power today, with immediate effect.

Retired High Court judge Sir John Hansen will be the new board chairman, while the other new appointee is Wellington company director John Spencer.

They join existing board members Jane Huria and Ross Tanner, who were appointed in September. The number of board members is cut from six to four.

Mr Power said that he had written to the six board members asking "whether they were confident they had the skills for new environment" following the review headed by Dame Margaret Bazley. The four resignations followed. Mr Power thanked the four departees for their service.

Dame Margaret's report, released on Friday, said some lawyers and defendants were "abusing the system to the detriment of clients, the legal aid system, the courts and the taxpayer".

She believed there was evidence that many lawyers had been acting corruptly in doing their work.

Administrative costs were out of control and the LSA seemed paralysed and unable to deal with the legal sector, the report said.

After reading the report Cabinet also agreed today to fold the LSA into the Justice Ministry, as recommended by the review, and appoint an independent statutory officer to oversee the granting of legal aid and the running of cases by the Public Defence Service.

A further review of the quality of legal services provided by legal aid lawyers and the disciplining of poorly performing lawyers would be made in two years, rather than the three years recommended by Dame Margaret, Mr Power said.

"The Government is particularly concerned by what Dame Margaret described as the threat to the viability of the legal aid system brought about by the system's governance.

"Her finding that the LSA appeared to have been `paralysed by difficult relationships and the assertion of control over the legal aid system by the legal profession' means we must move quickly," Mr Power said.

"Dame Margaret said many of the problems over the quality and behaviour of legal aid lawyers stemmed from issues with the relationship between the LSA and the Law Society, and with the Law Society's regulatory role, so we have to fix that."

Legal aid helps those who can't pay for their court defence so they are not deprived of a fair hearing, and the review found poor practices included:

* Lawyers making sentencing submissions without having read the pre-sentence report;

* Lawyers ignorant of legal principles and not realising their own ignorance;

* Lawyers failing to turn up at court;

* "Car boot" lawyers using District Court law library phones as their office numbers, and using interviewing rooms as their offices;

* Lawyers gaming the system by delaying a plea or changing pleas part-way through to maximise payments;

* Lawyers who demanded top-up payments from clients who did not understand legal aid; and

* Widespread abuse of the preferred lawyer policy by duty solicitors, including taking backhanders for recommending particular lawyers to applicants.

- NZPA