Do Lawyers Do Any Good

Basing itself on important data from the study of public defenders and private practice criminal defenders, this paper considers the work of criminal defence lawyers in England and Wales and Scotland. The work of criminal lawyers was assessed under a new methodology of “peer review” by dividing up the different stages of criminal defence work. A process of specific criminal defence criteria was produced and agreed with the profession and assessment results normalised in order to assure consistency of assessors. In some 7% of cases lawyers’ work was actually prejudicial, whether in the other 93% of cases it was actually useful is a more complex question. It is necessary to read the paper before coming to a decision. Paper delivered by Professor Avrom Sherr, Director, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies at the ILAG conference, Killarney, June 2005.