solicitors may soon be employed specifically to give emergency help to the victims of domestic violence - a suggestion greeted warily by women's groups.
The proposal, mooted as one of four areas of particular concern, was announced by Home Affairs Minister Henry McLeish as part of the first major review of the civil legal aid system in more than a decade.
The four areas were listed as:
qThe need to strengthen the existing framework of community legal services, giving consistency of provision throughout Scotland.
qA possible place for directly-employed solicitors to cover areas of unmet need, such as emergency help for domestic violence victims.
qPiloting legal-aid-funded family mediation to reduce acrimony surrounding divorce; and
qImproved access to justice for those who are just above the threshold for free civil legal aid.
The categories were broadly welcomed by legal experts, although there was concern that not enough emphasis was being placed on clarifying who is eligible for civil legal aid.
Decisions on legal aid eligibility have often baffled observers. For example, only a fraction of the costs faced by families of victims of the E-coli outbreak in Wishaw is to be paid by civil legal aid.
Some experts also insisted that any attempts to enforce mediation for families facing break-up would be a mistake, achieving further delays in a system already prone to time-wasting tactics.
''We welcome any discussion of the application of civil legal aid to the victims of domestic violence,'' said a spokeswoman for Women's Support Project.
''Previous changes to the civil legal aid system made it increasingly difficult for women to turn to the law to help free them from abusive relationships.''
Mr John Elliot, president of the Law Society, also welcomed the review's focus. He said: ''Domestic violence victims are in a very difficult and special category. We have been saying for some time that there must be some emergency way they can attain legal assistance at short notice to protect themselves. That must be an essential part of this review.''
But he added: ''We are extremely concerned generally about who civil legal aid covers. At the moment, there are many people with incomes just above the limits who have rights they cannot enforce, but this issue seems to have been missed out of the stated review aims.''
His worries were shared by Mr Cameron Fyfe, of Ross Harper & Murphy, which received more than any other Scottish firm in legal aid fees over the past year.
He said: ''Something has to be urgently done about the situation of eligibility, otherwise it will be the rich who will continue to win the legal battles, as happens now.
''The other big problem with the civil justice system as a whole is that it is still too complicated and expensive.
''We should do away once and for all with the wigs and all the archaic procedures and time-wasting tactics that lawyers adopt,'' he said. ''We need a quick-flip new system.''
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