Cyber Attack
It has been a challenging time in recent weeks for our Family Department and indeed all Family Legal Aid Practitioners and clients throughout England and Wales. At the same time that major retailers like M&S and Co-Op suffered significant cyber-attacks, so did the Legal Aid Agency (LAA). Consequently, the LAA portal has been offline since the attack. Legal Aid applications and certificates have been dealt with via the Legal Aid Agency’s online portal in recent years meaning that we have been without access to the system.
This has caused delay for many of our clients, as we have been unable to progress applications for Legal Aid. For those clients with existing Legal Aid certificates, we have been forced to rely on contingency measures to deal with extensions or amendments e.g. to represent them at a Final Hearing.
Where do legally aided family clients stand now?
There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that the portal remains down. Therefore, we have been unable to submit applications for new cases or for extensions of existing funding certificates via that platform, unless they were very urgent for example where a client required an application for an urgent a non-molestation order.
However, a new law has been passed which came into effect on Friday, 27th June 2025 called the The Criminal and Civil Legal Aid (Amendment) Regulations 2025 . Consequently, we are now able to submit non-urgent, standard Legal Aid applications via a designated email address to the Legal Aid agency.
This will temporarily replace the portal system until the portal is reinstated. Instead, we will need to draft a form setting out the merits of the case, together with completing with clients a means assessment form. These can now be sent to the Legal Aid Agency via email, along with any necessary evidence in support of the application such as bank statements, evidence of domestic abuse and Court Orders.
Any decisions made by the LAA on paper applications during contingency arrangements will be entered by the LAA onto their portal, once system access has been restored.
Similarly, we are now able to submit non-urgent applications to amend existing Legal Aid certificates via email temporarily.
In summary
Whilst this remains an uncertain time, we do now have some direction in terms of case progression for our clients. Our family team are currently prioritising cases that we had not been able to progress for several weeks on account of being unable to submit standard, non-urgent applications. We know that the Legal Aid Agency are striving to resolve the problems caused by the Cyber Attack. However at least in the meantime, we can now adopt a more proactive style of working to do what is most important; taking positive action to promote the best interests of our clients and their families.