LAST week, The Herald shone a spotlight on access to justice in Scotland. Scots lawyers are – ironically – often terrible advocates for their own interests.

Proposals to invest more money in the NHS are a safe bet. But ­persuading politicians to invest more ­money in lawyers has been a harder sell – not least because many of us are convinced they’re already coining it in.

Some of this is down to the distortion ­effect of the kind of legal aid payments ­being paid over to the apex of the ­profession, some because lawyers sometimes struggle to articulate the social good they ­contribute towards. But they shouldn’t.

Unpick the figures. Every year, the ­Scottish Legal Aid Board publishes a ­rundown of its top earners. In a country where the median income of a full-time worker is just over £35,500 a year before tax, the data shows Scotland’s top criminal lawyers are earning many multiples of that.

Top of the tree last year was Tony ­Lenehan KC, who took in £450,000 for his criminal defence work. Five more ­experienced ­lawyers earned £300,000 or more, with the rest of the top 20 taking home between just under £200,000 and £273,000.

Considering these salaries, you might think the supposed crisis in legal aid ­payments looks like an extraordinary spot of special pleading by greedy ­lawyers, whose most prosperous members are ­doing very nicely thank you. They are. But look again.

Senior silks' salaries

While you’d expect a newbie criminal defence lawyer defending minor cases in the Sheriff Court to earn less than ­experienced people shouldering responsibility for a complex High Court trial, the disparity between the healthy fees ­senior silks command and the going rate for ­solicitors and advocates working on ­ordinary and much more abundant crime is stark, with many lawyers working at less than the median salary to keep their firms afloat as going concerns.

Because of the scant fees they are paid, practitioners are incentivised to pile the cases high to secure a steady income stream. One reason this should concern us is that austerity and administrative chaos is one emerging cause of miscarriages of justice internationally. You get the kind of quality you’re prepared to pay for.

Harried lawyers given scant time to prepare their cases are inevitably going to miss ­potential lines of inquiry, and leave some questions ­unasked, increasing the risk of wrongful convictions, particularly in the context of less serious crime not receiving the Rolls-Royce treatment in big High Court ­prosecutions.

The public might not realise it, but ­entering criminal law for the ­material benefits it can bring you is a fool’s ­errand. Devoting yourself to the service of our criminal courts is in most cases an ­opportunity to earn a modest income, to experience the soul-shredding stress of having people’s fate in your hands, and to live a life of almost constant professional flux as you’re expected to deal with more and more cases for less and less financial recognition.

Unable to offer the job security a ­prosecution gig brings you, Scotland’s defence bar sometimes feels held together with rags and patches, kept going only by the resilience of its surviving members and the principled commitment to the ­importance of fair trials.

Dead letters

Holyrood can pass all the performative legislation it likes – MSPs can dream up new civil remedies for domestic abuse, the Government can reheat warm words about how important access to ­justice must be – but if justice can’t be ­accessed, can’t be ­afforded, or simply isn’t ­available in your local community, then all the ­progressive reforms in the world are of no use, their protections exposed as ­theoretical and ­illusory rather than ­practical and effective, effectively dead letters.

And it isn’t just in the field of criminal justice. We know a wee bit about access to justice locally. Earlier this year, ­Glasgow Caledonian University’s Law Clinic turned 10 years old.

Conceived, established and led by my enterprising colleague Claire McFadzean, over the last decade, our students have dealt with more than 1000 ­enquiries from members of the public, provided guidance or assistance to ­people who ­otherwise couldn’t access legal advice or services, and have won a few awards along the way.

Since Law Society president Bruce ­Beveridge cut the ribbon and ­inaugurated the clinic’s work, under Claire’s ­guidance, our law students have tackled more than 200 cases, with a total value of at least £135,000.

They’ve interviewed clients, written letters, visited schools and ­colleges, and popped up on Buchanan Street, spreading the gospel that we’re here and ready to support people with unmet legal needs in the local ­community. And, as last week’s series of reports ­highlighted, we’re not short of work.

Some disputes are resolved amicably, some mediate out – but over the last ­decade, our students have sometimes had to chase justice all the way to the ­Sheriff Court, representing clients at ­formal ­hearings, making submissions, ­acting up as the kind of lawyers they hope to be in future. This was, as you probably ­imagine, a hair-raising experience for the ­undergrads involved, but they showed their gumption, kept calm, and won the day.

Legal advice

The benefits of this initiative flow both ways. For clients, the clinic gives them an opportunity to access legal advice and representation which would otherwise be unavailable to them. Often, the issue isn’t that their legal claims lack merit, but ­given the modest value of sums involved, it’d cost a professional solicitor more to see their legal action through than the ­total cash value of the money in dispute.

Imagine the frustration of being told you have a good legal case, but that it’s too expensive for you to retain a solicitor to make your case or win you the ­justice the law says you deserve.

But it’d be a serious mistake to think these cases are unimportant just because the dispute turns on a few hundred rather than hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Housing issues are law clinics’ bread and butter. Landlords who don’t honour their legal duties and keep hold of their tenants’ deposits remain a source of grief for some tenants across the rental sector – and sometimes all it takes is a bit of legal know-how, some confidence in letter-writing, and a situation which would have left a precarious person out of pocket can be resolved in their favour.

That’s where university Law Clinics have stepped in. In Scotland, they’ve been a quiet phenomenon over the last couple of decades. In a visionary way, Professor Donald Nicolson founded the first clinic at Strathclyde University in 2003 and it continues to go from strength to strength.

Independent representation

With funding from the Scottish Government, the University of Glasgow has recently launched a more specialist centre, providing independent legal representation to complainers in sexual violence cases. The University of Dundee is the latest to join the club, launching its new free legal advice service in February this year, focusing on unmet legal needs in Scotland’s fourth city, Angus, and Fife.

The rise of the clinics is a poignant reminder that universities ought to be civic institutions, rooted in the communities around them, both worldly and locally concerned.

Clinic directors are increasingly lynchpin academics for Scotland’s law schools, connecting students not only with unmet legal need in their communities, but also teaching the next generation of potential lawyers real-world skills about how to talk to people, how to spot the key legal issues in a complex personal story, and even more fundamentally, showing young people that they have some agency in the world.

Law clinics are giving youngsters across the country the gentle push they need to realise it. Given our experience over the last 10 years, it also leaves them with a continuing passion for pro bono work.

All universities talk about the kind of values they’d like to encourage in their ­students – confidence, integrity, ­creativity, a social conscience – but law clinics involve them in mankind, ­expose them to their scope to do good in small places close to home, planting little ­flowers in legal aid deserts, watching them bloom.