Educación complementaria

Refugee Legal Service - RLS

The RLS is the largest specialised unit operating under the Legal Aid Board. It was set up to respond to the demand for representation for immigrants seeking asylum. It primarily represents asylum seekers before the Refugee Appeals Tribunal. It is a very centralised unit in comparison to the geographically dispersed Law Centres. The RLS has its main office in Dublin. It had an office in Cork and Galway but these have now been integrated with the local Law Centre. In terms of staff numbers the RLS is a significant component having approximately one quarter of the total Legal Aid Board staff complement.

The RLS has dealt with a large caseload of over 11,000 cases in each of the three years 2007-2009. This caseload has reduced in 2010 through a combination of an increase in the number of cases cleared in 2009 and a reduced number of new cases received. It is also noteworthy that during the 2007 – 2009 period the RLS made significant efforts to close old cases. As a result a considerable number of “backlog files” are included as “cases cleared” during those years even though, in practice, most of the work required on the cases concerned would already have been completed in earlier years.

The staffing structures and operational arrangements for the RLS were designed to ensure rapid

was possible because of the more routine nature of the cases involved compared to cases arising in the Board’s wider Law Centre network. It is also acknowledged that the value of the RLS as a comparator for the Law Centres is extremely limited for a number of reasons:

- the client base and type of case is different and therefore not comparable

- the RLS is very centralised where as the Law Centres are very dispersed

- the RLS essentially has its own Court, the Refugee Appeals Tribunal (RAT) which has a

different system to the Courts Service, for scheduling cases.

For all of the above reasons, the RLS is simply not directly comparable to the Law Centre network generally, so no conclusions or inferences about the relative efficiency of the RLS compared to the Law Centres can be made.

Medical Negligence Unit

The Medical Negligence Unit is a specialised unit that handles all cases of medical negligence from people that are eligible for legal aid. It was set-up in 2006 when existing medical negligence cases were

transferred from individual Law Centres to the MNU and from 2008 all new medical negligence cases were also handled by this unit. Medical Negligence is a specialised area and it was unreasonable to expect that the requisite expertise could be provided in every Law Centre. These cases generally carry a greater risk than others for the Legal Aid Board – for example, if claims are not lodged within a set time period then they are inadmissible and the client has lost the opportunity for compensation. Significant expense will be incurred if a case is to proceed so a detailed assessment of the merits of a case is required. The Medical Negligence Unit was established in order to manage and minimise the risk associated with these cases.

The Unit handles a lesser number of cases than a typical or even small Law Centre. A lower percentage of cases go to court. These cases are expensive to pursue and significant effort goes into assessing whether a case should proceed to court or not. A large percentage of cases are determined in the first year and most of these would not proceed to court. A feature of the Medical Negligence Unit is that fewer cases reach year 2 or 3 than in a typical Law Centre. The number of new cases received in a year is usually greater than the number on hand at the beginning of the year demonstrating again the high pre-court attrition rate for these types of case.

These characteristics make the Medical Negligence Unit unique in the group of Legal Aid Board Offices. The solicitor days per case cleared and total direct cost per case cleared are high, when compared to Law Centres, but fell substantially from its first to second year of operation. Given that the MNU performs a specialised function, and the fact that the period under examination included the set-up period when cases were being transferred from Law Centres to the MNU, means that the MNU is not a good comparator for other Law Centres.

The MNU was visited as part of this evaluation. From the information gathered on that visit it appears to be tightly managed with its own in-house systems for case tracking and meeting key case deadlines. Time worked and costs are assigned to individual cases. The impressions from the visit to the office is that it is run in an efficient manner, but given that the office was only recently established, the fact that there are no suitable comparators and that only data for 2008 and 2009 was examined, it is not possible to make more definitive statements on the efficiency of the MNU.