(fees I took were from the most serious type of offence).
Indeed. Making the basic fee flat on whether a guilty plea was given, or not, would apear in this very simple scenario to make an early guilty plea 60% more profitable for a lawyer (as opposed to the 75% given in the article.)
Then, just to add another thing that annoys me from the article…
Likewise, in magistrates courts a simple guilty plea [for instance, for common assault] will reward lawyers with a 17% pay increase. This flies in the face of the government’s advertised 17.5% cuts to save £220m from the legal aid budget.
The association said the revised fees would result in some lawyers losing out as much as 65% in some magistrate court cases and up to 73% in some crown court cases. Steven Bird, a London solicitor and LCCSA member, said: "The only conclusion to draw from these figures is the sad truth that the new fee structure is ideological and has nothing to do with austerity. "
So, the changes will both increase pay to lawyers, thus not saving the government money, but then will also reduce money to lawyers in some cases by up to 75% thus saving the government money?
