One might ask why the focus should be on quality assurance in legal aid as opposed to the legal profession in general. This is because the means to assess and ensure the quality of legal aid and the coordination of services are interconnected. The best coordinated and free provision of legal service should have as central elements measures for the promotion, monitoring, evaluation and maintenance of the quality of legal aid.
The other side of the coin is that a high(r) quality of legal aid service can promote the coordination of legal aid services. The above features of a legal aid system for South Africa will probably also lead to greater efficiency in the services offered. To do this, legal aid providers must have appropriate quality assurance measures and mechanisms in place.
One of the most striking developments on the international legal services scene in the last decade concerns the quality of work of legal aid lawyers and how this has become a topic of central importance.33.
6 Establishing what must be monitored and identifying existing needs
It would be the duty of assessors who consider themselves to have a very close relationship with the legal aid organization or a particular member of staff of the organization being assessed, to withdraw from that particular assessment. This must be the case if legal aid clients are not to be sold on the quality of the legal services they are offered. The establishment of a quality assessment mechanism for South African legal aid must start from the ground up.
Several legal aid providers in South Africa have been shown to have helped many clients in this way.45. As regards the criteria by which the quality of legal aid services in South Africa should be assessed, objective and established assessment criteria are needed. All members of the yet-to-be-established legal aid association envisaged in this document should participate in the creation of the selected evaluation criteria, and the criteria for meeting these criteria would be comparative.
When evaluating legal aid, there must be levels of performance that are desirable to allow a more detailed assessment and not just a decision on whether the work done is adequate or not.48 Have levels. In Scotland, for example, a system of peer review has been introduced under the Law Society's Quality Assurance Committee for "all civil legal aid and advice and assistance providers". Paterson and Sherr's research on peer review and quality assurance of legal aid provision concludes that quality assurance review must be carried out by appropriate persons.
First, although this requirement should be self-evident, it is essential that the quality assurance measures and mechanisms for evaluating the work of legal aid service providers are based on established criteria (as opposed to a "gut feel" type of assessment). Being knowledgeable and established in the field would imply that the assessor has worked for some time and is well respected in the legal aid sphere. Finally, to persuade legal aid practitioners to cooperate and support the quality assurance process (as opposed to perhaps viewing it as time-wasting bureaucracy), Paterson and Sherr suggest that the criteria and levels of performance be achieved through a process of negotiation with the lawyers.
It is a tribute to the legal aid quality assurance system of Scotland that the Netherlands have chosen to follow the Scottish approach very closely in their own initiatives. An important element of the Dutch experience above is that, although they borrowed heavily from Scotland's legal aid quality assurance system, they introduced their own criteria and benchmarks against which the quality of their own legal aid services was judged.
7 Monitoring and evaluation challenges
8 Proposals for means of legal aid quality assurance
International Legal Aid Group (ILAG).62 The following paragraphs will draw significantly from the experiences and contributions of ILAG members and delegates to its biennial conferences. At first glance, it is suggested that the legal aid service should be clearly extended by telephone legal advice. Currie emphasizes the need for any legal aid model to comprehensively determine which urgent and unmet legal aid needs of the poor are not being met by the existing legal aid system.75 This would be done by taking into account the number and nature of requests for legal aid compared to those assisted by legal aid providers.
Such basic research is necessary because additional potential clients may not have applied for legal aid, because they are unaware of their legal rights or because there is no legal aid provider available to assist them, or because they cannot access services. It can be said that determining whether the main legal aid needs in an area are met is related to quality assessment, since if the needs are not met, a satisfactory system cannot be said to exist for legal aid. Linked to the need to identify unmet legal aid needs, Kádár advocates that any legal aid system comprehensively assess the capacity of legal aid providers to meet existing legal aid needs76.
There is scope for future research into assessments of client satisfaction in relation to the quality of legal aid services provided. There is no obvious evidence that the client community participates in the management of or prioritizes legal aid, nor is there any information or statistical data available assessing public perception of the legal aid institution. It is clear that it will be beneficial for the legal aid offered to have client input on both of these aspects.77.
However, these processes are aimed at worst-case scenarios and do not monitor the quality of daily legal assistance. The individual focus means that a broader scope of legal practitioners' work is unlikely to be monitored to identify systemic problems.78 Furthermore, the non-legal staff used by legal aid providers, such as paralegals, are not regulated . Importantly, future research should examine whether legal aid services meet the needs of certain groups such as women, children, persons with disabilities, refugees and the LGBTIQA+.
9 Conclusion
The negative impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on access to legal aid will be felt over time. The quality of services provided during this period in turn requires careful monitoring and evaluation, especially in areas such as telephone legal assistance. While service providers can be held accountable for the clients they serve, it is a more difficult task to account for those who have not had access to legal aid when they needed it.
Basic research that identifies and analyzes citizens' legal aid needs is now more important than ever. Such data would allow service providers to carefully calibrate their services and monitor and evaluate the services provided to accurately reflect the needs of potential customers. Bhabha believes that access to justice needs to be institutionalized.81 This paper has just such a goal in mind for South Africa.
The extent to which these needs are met and by whom can best be determined by adopting a coordinated approach to the provision of legal aid, which, crucially, includes monitoring and evaluating the quality of services provided. This model, if implemented, should internalize access to justice and provide a high-quality civil legal aid scheme that works optimally and covers the main civil legal aid needs through a multifaceted but coordinated approach in which the quality of services provided is guaranteed. a central part.
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List of Abbreviations
