How to Find Legal Aid

First and foremost, it is probably necessary to state the fact that legal assistance in the UK is no longer actually referred to as legal aid. The service is offered through Community Legal Services (CLS) and this covers a number of different areas of law.

For the more trivial areas of civil law, you may need to accept that legal assistance is not going to be available. An excellent example here being for cases that involve personal injury claims. Legal assistance bills are increasing massively year-on-year and this is the main reason why the government scrapped the availability of legal aid in certain areas of law in 2000.

Another important thing to remember with legal assistance is that there may not be a huge choice of solicitors in all parts of the country. For the widest choice of solicitors London will always come out on top.

Once you do manage to secure a reliable firm of solicitors to assist you in any case, there will then be different tiers of help that they can provide. This will all depend on factors like your income and the seriousness and chances of success in your case. If a solicitor and the means tests that are set out through the CLS indicate that you only qualify for initial advice, you will find it very hard to secure any more from any legal provider. This would mean that you will have to pay for any further representation.

With criminal law, however, you will always have a full right to secure legal representation for as long as it is required. So basically, there is a lot more to legal aid than you may think. You will never have an absolute right to representation in a case and this will be especially prevalent in less serious areas of civil law.

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