The Legal Services Commission has issued a press release to all Crime Contract holders regarding the recording of travel time in Police Station and Magistrates Court cases.

• From 1st July 2008, providers do not need to record travel time in police station cases unless those cases are classed as exceptional.
• From 1st July 2008, providers do not need to record travel time in magistrates court cases in the 16 main urban areas as this is already allowed for in the fee.

However…

1. Given that you don’t always know when a police station case is going exceptional and
2. You need to be watching all the costs of providing legal aid work very closely

we would advise iLaw users not to ditch the recording of this time just yet.

One of the most important things that iLaw can give you is a complete understanding of how much it costs your firm to provide legal aid work under contract. It helps you now with issues like forecasting cash flow / work in progress and forward planning and in the future when it comes to competitive tendering. All of this help needs good data from your team in the form of accurate time recording so hiding any costs will skew the quality of the information iLaw can give you. The most successful firms are those who are recording and monitoring the cost of everything as it enables them to make good business decisions in time. So use iLaw to its maximum and keep recording your time well.

Every quarter we release a new version of iLaw. This is mainly because the Legal Services Commission has instituted a raft of changes but also because we have added some good stuff that we think you will like. These service packs come out on a disc in time honoured fashion and your IT bod – or the person in the office nominated to be them for a day – gets to run around updating all the PC’s in your office.

Then 3 days later we will get an email from the LSC saying something along the lines of ‘Sorry guys but we had to change something .. again’ and we are left thinking about *another* shipment of discs, not knowing whether you really want to see them for another 3 months.

So we have changed iLaw to make it easier for you to stay up to date with interim service releases without having to collect more pink discs than you ever wanted to own. This is how you do it:

Go to the Housekeeping menu on the menu bar and select Check for software updates.

This will check your current version of iLaw. If you are up to date, it will tell you. If you are not, it will take you to our website and download the latest version. Really simple.