Anyone new to CCMS who tries to allocate a barrister’s fees to CCMS will find that they quickly hit a brick wall. They enter the name of the barrister into what appears to be a database search field and press Search. No barrister matching that name is found. After waiting for a response from the Legal Aid Agency’s IT support about this or finding someone in the office familiar with CCMS, the new user will be informed that this search feature has never worked and counsel can only be found by searching for them using their Legal Aid Account number, which can be found on their fee notes.

As with the Universal Credit problem, I can see no good reason for this problem not having been detected and fixed ten years ago. It seems, though, that the Legal Aid Agency doesn’t think that providing a proper search feature is important enough to do anything about it or just can’t be bothered. Based on the idea that if you are going to do something, you might as well do it properly, I think that this is unacceptable.