Many lawyers had hoped that the days of ill-thought-out legal reform and bad legislation – a favourite pastime of the last Government – were long since gone. But the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill suggests otherwise, particularly when it comes to libel actions, access to justice and conditional fee agreements.
For years, while I worked for a national newspaper, I railed against Conditional Fee Agreements (CFAs) with a 100% uplift on a base hourly rate of £500 per hour and how they were misused by greedy solicitors and too often amounted to a crippling penalty on a defendant who had a genuine defence but had only just lost a case.
