What happens when workers are ignored during digital transformation?

The Legal Aid Agency processes fee claims from legal professionals for their work on legal aid cases. In 2016 a new system was introduced as part of a wider digitisation programme, including the automation of assessing and awarding payment claims made by barristers. Case workers weren’t consulted on the introduction and functionality of the system, and there with weak mechanisms to feed back on its operation and impacts on workers and other stakeholders. Among wider significant disruption, it became apparent that the system had been incorrectly assessing claims, with an 19% error rate (compared to 3% for case workers) leading to costly overpayments, audits, corrections and revisions, as well as additional staff workload, disruption and dissatisfaction.

This case study is part of a series exploring how public sector organisations involve the public, workers and civil society in decisions about data and AI, and some of the consequences when they do not. Read more about our work on public involvement in public sector data and AI.

The justice system is struggling with significant backlogs and delays. The Legal Aid Agency (LAA), which manages legal aid and lawyer fees faced extensive budget cuts under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government and introduced the Client and Cost Management System (CCMS) in April 2016.

CCMS was meant to simplify legal aid administration, but it was beset by problems from the start, leading to protests by lawyers during pilot phases. Research found that the additional unpaid time spent dealing with poor CCMS functionality and stability was a big problem for legal aid barristers, with major outages in 2019 and 2020.

But it wasn’t just the barristers who were finding the system hard to use: LAA workers also found it cumbersome, and complained of a lack of training. Workers felt the system had been imposed without consultation, increasing workloads and setting unrealistic productivity benchmarks. Of more concern, the partially automated system had a high error rate (19% at one point) in fee disbursements, accepting some barrister submissions without question, adding to the sense of unfairness. Combined with inadequate support and inappropriate retasking, morale amongst workers sank, and in 2021, the LAA acknowledged that staff retention was a ‘corporate level risk’.

“I’ve worked in so many places where they’ve brought new systems in and the workers are not consulted on what they need. It’s introduced by management who don’t understand what the nitty gritty of the actual day job is, they don’t fully understand it and yet they won’t consult.” — Legal Aid Agency employee and trade union representative

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