News In Focus
13 December 2011
ESTO directors deny improper actings
The directors of a new venture offering to relieve criminal defence solicitors of the burden of advising suspects detained in police stations, have denied making improper use of information gained in negotiations with the legal aid authorities.
Launched yesterday with the aim of being operational in January once solicitors have been recruited and trained, ESTO Law Ltd has been formed as a company with seven directors, five of whom served until recently on the Law Society of Scotland's Legal Aid Negotiating Team (LANT) dealing with criminal legal aid.
The five are John Scott QC (Edinburgh), Ian Bryce (Livingston), Ken Dalling (Stirling), Vincent McGovern (Hamilton) and Stuart Munro (Glasgow). The other directors are Neil Robertson, a partner of Ian Bryce, and John Keenan, a partner of John Scott.
ESTO offers defence solicitors liable to be called out to police stations at any hour, a means of outsourcing this work without losing the client for any subsequent proceedings. It undertakes that its role will conclude once the police station work has been reported on to the instructing solicitor and to the Scottish Legal Aid Board. "This should relieve you of the pressure of providing out of hours advice, while offering reassurance that your clients are being well advised and will not be lost to you", its launch document promises.
Mr Scott told the Journal that he did not expect ESTO's business model to be affected by the next round of legal aid cuts, with subsumption (the proposed inclusion of the fee for this advice within the fixed fee for summary criminal cases) having just been dropped by the Government in the face of opposition from the profession.
"So far as geographical spread goes," he added, "we will obviously deal with phone calls from any police station. As for visits we hope to have cover in the central belt, and possibly Dundee and Aberdeen." If videoconferencing technology was adopted as the Scottish Government and SLAB appeared to hope, coverage could be further extended. He and his colleagues are interviewing candidates, "many of whom have been unable to find jobs or have just left other positions".
Glasgow solicitors have reacted with hostility and suspicion, some accusing the former LANT members of using "insider information" to develop the ESTO model, or of paving the way for criminal legal aid franchising in Scotland - a model opposed by the profession. However the ESTO directors have insisted that all the information on which they based their venture has been available to the whole profession, and that the concern had been "overblown".