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Set Up Legal Aid Contracts

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Important: This feature only applies if you are based in England or Wales and have Legal Aid active on your Clio account. The Legal Aid billing functionality is available to all customers on all plans.

Legal Aid is the provision of assistance to people otherwise unable to afford legal representation and access to the court system. Legal Aid in England and Wales is administered by the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) and is available for most criminal and civil cases, as well as some family law cases.

The ability to work with the LAA is necessary for UK firms as Legal Aid will cover legal fees for clients that are eligible for their services. Approximately 2,100 law firms in the UK are registered Legal Aid practitioners.

Note: While Clio's LAA Submission template CSV may look different from the available template provided by the UK Government website, all the required information by the LAA is provided by Clio when the CSV is generated.

Set up Legal Aid Contracts

Note: Before setting up Legal Aid, you must set your country in your Settings to United Kingdom.
  1. Go to Settings > Firm Preferences > Legal Aid (England & Wales).
  2. Click Add LAA Configuration.
  3. Enter the required information.
  4. Click Save.
Important: At this time, the Legal Aid feature only supports the CSV format required by the CWA (Contracted Work and Administration) portal, which is compatible with civil controlled and criminal controlled practice areas. For the civil certificated practice area, you would need a compatible file for CCMS submission, which is currently not supported by Clio.

 

Legal Aid submission generation

You can set the default date filter and bill approval status for the submission generation of legal aid bills using the steps below.

    1. Go to Settings > Firm Preferences > Legal Aid (England and Wales).
    2. Under Legal Aid submission generation, select your date filter preference for legal aid bills.
    3. Under Bill Approval, pick whether you want bills to automatically be approved upon submission generation or remain in the not approved state. 

 

Overview of Legal Aid categories

The Legal Aid Fields and Legal Aid Activity Category Rates are set to appear exclusively for matters that have one of the below practice areas. If this is not set in the matter, the fields and the rates will not appear.

      • Legal Aid – Civil Controlled
      • Legal Aid – Civil Certificated  
      • Legal Aid – Criminal Controlled 
Note: If you are not able to view the Legal Aid Activity Category Rates or/and Legal Aid Section (this will be located under the Related Contacts section) when creating or editing a matter, it may be due to your account, client, or matter not being properly set up for Legal Aid.

 

Create a Legal Aid Contact

Client not yet in Clio Client already in Clio
  1. Click New Person on the top right of your Clio account.
  2. Click Person.
  3. Enter the client's First and Last Name.
  4. Click Add advanced Client Details for Legal Aid.
  5. Enter the required Legal Aid details (including date of birth).
  6. Record any further client details.
  7. Click Save and create new matter if you are creating the matter from this page.

 

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