Fortunes are made in the City while legal aid lawyers struggle—is it time for the commercial sector to pay back some of the profits it has received from the public sector?
Writing in NLJ this week, Geoffrey Bindman QC compares the astronomical earnings of City partners and high starting salaries of City trainees with those in the publicly funded sector. Bindman, who has worked at both poles of the profession, says legal aid lawyers’ work ‘demands no less knowledge, skill or stress than commercial law’.
He points out that City wealth is often derived from huge fees charged to the public sector, citing the discovery by a joint parliamentary committee that Slaughter and May delivered bills for over £8m to Carillion for legal advice in the eight months before its collapse. Carillion was mainly engaged in outsourced public projects.
Bindman concludes: ‘Would it not be fair to recoup from the commercial sector some of the profit they have received from the public purse?’
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