Monitoring legal services

We have arrangements in place to monitor legal services by:

• Analysing the organisation’s data on trends in legal assistance and supply.
• Supplementing this with other sources of data about legal services including information that may be requested of the Law Society of Scotland, the Faculty of Advocates and the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service.
• Seeking the views of stakeholders, including service providers and users.

Where possible, in order to gain insight into access to legal services, we will convene groups of specialist organisations with specific interests and expertise in the topics being assessed for discussion.

The topics chosen for assessment under monitoring duty are based on identifying those areas of law which are either:

• Anticipated to be at the potentially highest risk of problems.
• Those in which legal aid plays a substantial role.
• Directly relevant to the broader policy issues of the day, so as to maximise the relevance of our monitoring work to a range of stakeholders.

Since 2017, we have adopted the above approach to how we monitor legal services.

We include monitoring availability and accessibility as part of our general research programme, which informs both broader surveys and more bespoke work that we conduct.

Please contact John Osborne, Policy Projects Manager, on 0131 240 1889 or by email, for more information about this work.