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Ombudsman's Report on Monitoring of Assigned-out Cases by Legal Aid Department
In April 2005 the Ombudsman announced that she would initiate a direct investigation of the Legal Aid Department (LAD) regarding its administrative arrangements for assigning out legal aid cases; the mechanism for monitoring their progress and the evaluation system of assigned lawyers. During the investigation, the Ombudsman has, with the consent of the aided persons concerned, looked at 36 cases which took over 5 years to complete and commented on 7 of them in her investigation report published in January 2006.
The Ombudsman focused on LAD's monitoring of civil cases, because in criminal cases involving personal liberty of the accused, the prosecution usually set the pace for the proceedings under the watchful eye of the court.
The investigation report expressed concern on seven cases studied and makes general recommendations in respect of first charge, monitoring (including progress report, evaluation and appraisal of assigned lawyers, intervention by LAD), enforcement of judgment, use of checklist by assigned lawyers, and enhancement of LASC's effectiveness.
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| Council's Interest Group on Assignment System and Monitoring of Assigned-out Cases held a meeting on 23 March 2006 to review the findings and recommendations of The Ombudsman's Report. |
LAD noted that the investigation report did not reveal major deficiency in its established system and procedures for monitoring legal aid cases, accepting however that in some of the cases studied, there were areas for improvement. It was in the process of implementing improvement measures and would continue to, as an on-going process, review the systems in place and introduce improvements where appropriate to improve its service to the public.
According to the Legal Aid Services Council Ordinance, the Council has the responsibility to oversee the administration of LAD's legal aid services. Over the past years, Council has worked with LAD and sought to seek improvement in policy and procedures, particularly in the area of monitoring of assigned out cases. However, Council and the LAD are separate entities, and according to the Legal Aid Ordinance information obtained by LAD is confidential, and Council is not privy to such. Additionally the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance imposes certain conditions of maintaining secrecy on any organization which obtains personal data of third parties. Hence the function of the Council in terms of supervising or overseeing the legal aid services by LAD is circumscribed by those provisions. The situation may be likened to the Ombudsman's investigation where she could only go through 36 case files out of the selected two hundred odd cases for which consent was obtained from the parties concerned, or in the case of audit investigation by the Director of Audit who has to be given consent from the relevant aided persons before the corresponding files will become available for his scrutiny.
In this connection, Council commissioned a consultancy study on legal aid practice on cost control and monitoring of case progress in January 2005 and is considering how some of the recommendations can be taken forward. Council is studying the Ombudsman's report to establish what further steps to take with a view to improving service provision.
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