This is the first in a series of posts on fixes that I would like the Legal Aid Agency to make to the online Client and Cost Management system, better known as CCMS. Some of my suggestions may seem petty or unimportant. In response I argue that if you are going to do something, you should do it properly and take pride in what you have done. These do not seem like difficult problems to fix, so they should be fixed unless the Legal Aid Agency can explain why they can’t be.

Stating in no particular order, my first issue is the double login problem…

Since CCMS came back online at the end of 2025, it has been necessary for users to log in twice in order to get access. The first time seems to be to log in to a server or platform on which the CCMS system runs. After entering a user name, a password, and then a password number selected by Microsoft’s Authenticator app and getting in once, the user then has to go through exactly the same process a second time before actually being given access to CCMS.

I am happy to be corrected on this, but I can’t see any good reason for this double login process other than perhaps for the Legal Aid Agency to be able to demonstrate that, following the hacking problems that brought the CCMS system down in 2025, they are now highly security-conscious. The problem is though that if a hacker is able to log in to the system once using the above process, requiring them to log in a second time is not going to stop them. I can’t see why a second login is necessary at all or how the wasted time which users spend logging in twice can be justified.

There was another really bad new problem with CCMS when it came back online. That was that: when uploading documents, you could not include spaces between words. For instance, rather than typing the term “Solicitor Report,” you had to type “SolicitorReport” or “Solicitor_Report” or have the system reject the document when you tried to upload it. To their credit, the Legal Aid Agency spotted this error and appreciated how annoying it was for users. After some weeks the system was updated, and we can now upload documents with spaces between the words in their names. This shows that maybe other problems like this one and the others I will be posting about soon can also be fixed. Thank you to whoever fixed this.

My first CCMS fix request to anyone from the Legal Aid Agency reading this who might be able to help is to get rid of the double login so that, as with just about every other website that requires a login, I only have to log in once or tell me why CCMS is different from the others and requires a double login

More fix requests to follow….