The credit crunch may dominate world headlines but closer to home lawyers are feeling the impact of their own pay squeeze.

The latest sign is the eruption of an angry factional dispute between solicitors and barristers over rates of pay in family cases.

The Law Society has attacked moves by the Bar to maintain what it calls “an indefensible discrimination between barristers and solicitor-advocates” doing family legal aid cases, saying that the two should be paid the same.

“Barristers are paid more than their solicitor counterparts for advocacy, even though they perform the same role,” the society says. Paul Marsh, president of the society, accuses the Family Law Bar Association of claiming to support harmonisation in principle — while arguing against it in practice.

“This is shameless self-interest,” he says. “Barristers have lower overheads than solicitors because they are a referral profession. Yet barristers are still generally paid more in absolute terms. Their profit on those fees is much greater than the solicitor’s profit. This will remain the case even after harmonisation. Fees for the same service should be the same whoever supplies it.”

The Bar’s response is that — yes, there should be fixed fees for all kinds of legal aid work and that is what it is pressing for in long complex trials under the present dispute over payment for those cases. But a spokesman added: “If solicitors are not happy with their own rates of pay, that is something they should take up with the Legal Services Commission. The Bar offers good value for money — if solicitors think they are being underpaid, then make representations about it.”

The somewhat unseemly scrapping over fees is the endgame of the Carter reforms to legal aid, which brought in a new fees regime. The Bar negotiated a better deal than solicitors. It is also the upshot of the squeeze on the £2 billion a year legal aid budget.

As the legal year opened last week, family barristers expressed “dismay and concern” about the decline in the number of applications for child protection orders by local authorities — as well as the Ministry of Justice proposals to cut £12 million from the budget for family cases.

High quality representation needs to be available to all, the Bar says, not just to those who can afford it.

That claim, about high-quality legal representation, is at the centre of another factional dispute — this time on the criminal front. Solicitors have taken umbrage over Bar proposals for a protocol over the instruction of advocates in the Crown Court.

Solicitors say that they are implicitly being criticised over choice of advocate — with an implication that solicitor-advocates are taking on cases beyond their competence. Meanwhile, barristers, solicitors say, often return briefs because they are double-booked — undermining the principle that one advocate should see through the case from start to finish.

The Bar’s response? “We have a protocol we have agreed with the Crown Prosecution Service and in our view this should apply to all advocates, whether barristers or solicitors.” It also accuses some solicitors of “behaving unethically in demanding referral fees from barristers to be given legal aid cases.”

Late returned briefs, referral fees, claims over competence — it all bears testimony to an increasingly tough market where it is becoming hard to make a living — and in which legal aid lawyers will increasingly go to the wall.

The public may not care much about turf wars between branches of the legal profession but the public will suffer when the service in the courts is found wanting. That is the issue legal aid lawyers would do better to address.

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