The Legal Executive

Legal aid

1,709 people on the CILEX registers — 15% — work for a firm holding at least one legal aid contract. Family and crime account for most of them, and those are precisely the two areas where a chartered legal executive can hold the litigation and advocacy rights to run the case themselves.

Why this is the interesting half of the register

Legal aid work is where the shape of this profession and the shape of the Bar diverge most sharply. Publicly funded family and criminal work is conducted overwhelmingly by employed fee earners in high-street firms, which is what most of the 7,727 authorised CILEX practitioners are. The geography of the two professions follows from it.

It is also the evidence base for judicial appointment. A paper sift that asks what cases you have run rewards exactly the practice this table describes — and the profession is shortlisted at a third of the Bar's rate.

How this was joined, and what it does not say

Every employer on the CILEX register that could be matched to a company at Companies House was joined, on company number, against the Legal Aid Agency's directory of 4,700 provider offices. An exact join on a registered identifier, not a name match: a firm never picks up another firm's contracts.

What it does not say is that any individual does legal aid work. It says their employer holds the contract. A firm with a crime contract also does private work, and the register records neither. Nor is the absence of a firm evidence: a legal aid provider that is a partnership rather than a company has no company number to join on, and 1,367 of the Agency's offices could not be matched to one at all.