When the scheme stalls, private work arrives by search

Six of this week’s eight headlines are about one funding row

Take the criminal defence news of the past three days and almost all of it points at the same place. The Irish Examiner reports legal aid certificates falling 93% as the Law Society calls for a mediator. The Law Society of Ireland publishes its president’s mediation bid. RTÉ carries the call for a mediator. The Irish Independent reports dozens of solicitors breaking ranks in the row over reform of legal aid fees. And across the border, the Belfast Telegraph reports rights groups criticising criminal legal aid reforms as “fundamentally flawed”.

This is a jurisdictional story, and a firm in Madrid or Manchester is not affected by an Irish fee schedule. What travels is the pattern, because the same argument arrives in every jurisdiction sooner or later: a publicly funded scheme gets reformed, the profession disputes the terms, and while that is being argued out, the flow of work through the scheme changes shape.

The point of reading it from outside is not the dispute. It is the number.

A 93% fall is a mix change, not a news item

Whatever the merits of either side — and that is a matter for the practitioners in that jurisdiction, not for us — a reported 93% fall in certificates describes a practice whose intake has been rerouted almost overnight.

For a criminal defence practice, publicly funded work and privately funded work do not arrive the same way. Scheme work arrives through a mechanism: a rota, a court, a duty list, an office that assigns. It is not marketing-dependent, which is exactly why so few defence firms have ever needed a business development habit. Privately funded work arrives through a person deciding, at speed and usually at night, which name to call.

So when scheme volume moves, a firm does not just lose or gain revenue. It changes the channel its work comes through — and the channel it is losing required no marketing while the channel it is gaining requires nothing else. Firms that discover this during the quarter it happens are already six months behind, because a page that will rank next spring has to exist this autumn.

The privately funded client starts somewhere other than your firm

A person who has been arrested, or whose son has been arrested, or who has received a letter asking them to attend an interview, does not begin with a shortlist. They begin with a question typed into a phone, and the question is almost never a firm’s name. It is a situation described in ordinary words.

That is the whole opportunity and the whole difficulty. The searches that precede a private criminal instruction are procedural and frightened: what happens at a police interview, whether a solicitor is needed for a voluntary attendance, what the first hearing involves, how long a case takes. They are not “criminal defence solicitor” — that query is the last one they type, not the first.

A defence practice that only publishes a practice-area page written in the language of the profession is invisible for the first ten questions and visible only for the eleventh, where it competes on nothing but position. A practice that answers the earlier questions plainly, without giving advice on anyone’s particular matter and without any suggestion about how a case will end, is present while the decision is still being made.

Somebody already owns “best criminal defence lawyer in your city”

The one headline in this week’s list that is not about the funding row is instructive precisely because it looks trivial. Daily Hive published “5 of the best criminal defence lawyers in Calgary”.

That is a publisher, not a law firm, occupying one of the highest-intent queries in the whole practice area. It will be read by people ready to instruct. And whatever it says, the firms named in it did not build that page and do not control it.

Spain has its own version of this, and so does every market: directories, city round-ups, comparison sites and marketplaces that sit above the firms they list. Advertising rules here are strict and rightly so — a Spanish firm cannot answer a round-up with claims about results, and should not want to. But the rules do not stop a firm from being the clearest, most useful explanation of a process on the internet in its own city. That is a positioning built on knowledge rather than on promises, which is the only kind that survives a compliance review anyway.

What to do this week

Look at where your criminal instructions actually came from over the last twelve months and separate scheme work from private work, honestly, by count and not by fee. If the private column is thin and the scheme column is doing the work, you are one policy decision away from needing a channel you have not built. Then write down the five questions a frightened person asks before they ever type the word “solicitor”, and check whether anything on your site answers even one of them.