THE SOUTH: An Introduction to Crime

The environment for criminal defence solicitors is now defined by squeeze and strain, with chronic under-resourcing meeting acute operational shocks. On the one hand, system resilience has been reduced by long-running, real-terms pressure on legal aid funding, recruitment and retention problems, and dilapidated court infrastructure , and the cost of running effective criminal practices, in terms of both time and money, has risen. On the other hand, sudden events such as the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) cyber attack have introduced liquidity and data security shocks that amplify those structural weaknesses and threaten the viability of smaller firms that mostly only undertake legal aid criminal defence work.

Trial listing and conclusion problems are the single biggest operational headache for all criminal solicitors. Crown Court backlogs, running into tens of thousands of cases, mean trial dates are routinely pushed years into the future, unevenly distributed by region and case type. The effect is cascading: more remand time for some defendants; longer periods of uncertainty for clients and witnesses; and heavier case management overheads for solicitors who must keep files live, maintain client contact and repeatedly prepare for hearings that do not start as scheduled. The statistics show that trial effectiveness remains below pre-pandemic norms and the absolute number of trials listed has fallen in recent quarters, underlining both capacity constraints and inefficiencies in listing.

That listing shortage translates directly into economic pressure on defence practices. Criminal solicitors operating under legal aid contracts face capped fees for stages of work that assume a predictable workflow. When trials are adjourned or relisted, or collapse late, solicitors incur repetitive fixed costs for staff time, expert instruction and travel, without commensurate incremental fee. For privately paying clients, this just adds extra expense to an already expensive process. The Ministry of Justice’s recent fee uplifts have been helpful in places, but many practitioners say they do not yet offset the combined input of inflation and the cost of keeping cases ready through prolonged listings.

Politically, pressure is increasing for structural reforms to reduce backlog pressure. Recent high-profile reviews have proposed measures ranging from greater judicial case triage and diversion, to more trials by judge alone for certain offences. These ideas reflect an urgent political appetite to show progress on capacity and timeliness, but they are controversial: defence lawyers warn that whittling away procedural protections or expanding non-jury trials risks undermining fairness and could shift rather than solve bottlenecks unless paired with investment in court buildings, digital systems and staff. The short-term political path is therefore likely to be a blend of piecemeal reforms, targeted funding boosts and pressure on agencies to improve operational performance – a combination that creates policy uncertainty for practitioners who must plan recruitment and capital spending amid changing rules of engagement.

The LAA cyber attack has converted operational uncertainty into a liquidity and risk crisis for many criminal solicitor firms. The attack – discovered in late April 2025 and confirmed as significant by the LAA – forced the agency to take online digital services offline, and triggered contingency arrangements for case authorisations and payments. The immediate consequences reported by firms included delayed payments, difficulty obtaining new authorisations, and uncertainty about the integrity and confidentiality of client data. For small or thin-margined practices, the delay or unpredictability of legal aid payments is existential: payroll and expert fee commitments must still be met even when the receipts are delayed. The reputational and professional ethics burden is also real: solicitors are rightly anxious about the exposure of client personal data and the heightened risk of fraud or extortion directed at vulnerable clients.

These twin phenomena of listing delays and an LAA systems collapse interact in harmful ways. Delays lengthen the lifecycle of a case, increasing the chance that a solicitor or counsel will need to be replaced, experts re-instructed, or files reassembled, with each step increasing cost and friction. The cyber incident has made routine administrative tasks (new contracts, payments, client onboarding) far harder, so when trials are eventually listed firms find themselves short of working capital and administrative capacity to handle bursts of activity. This is particularly acute for criminal duty schemes and smaller firms that cannot easily bridge months of delayed payment or run parallel paper systems at scale.

System level reform is needed at a practical level. Listing and conclusion rates will not materially improve without:

• increased and ring-fenced investment in court capacity (judges, courtrooms and custody transport);
• tighter and better-resourced digital contingency planning at the LAA and Ministry of Justice to prevent future outages; and
• procedural reforms that are piloted carefully to avoid unanticipated displacement effects.

The political calculus must recognise that slimming processes without investment risks legal and human rights challenges; conversely, public readiness to fund justice institutions remains constrained in an era of tight public finances.

Finally, the wider economic picture matters: inflation, a competitive labour market and rising overheads will continue to squeeze firms unless fee structures are recalibrated to reflect modern costs and patterns of listing. The LAA breach adds a new macro layer of risk, not theoretical, but cashflow and data reality, that must be addressed through collaborative remedies. Failure to do so risks the progressive hollowing out of criminal defence capacity in those areas of England and Wales where the system is already most fragile. Policymakers and providers must address both the long-term capacity deficit and the acute vulnerabilities exposed by the LAA cyber attack if the Crown Court is to be a functioning forum for timely, fair trials for defendants and victims alike.