February 2017 marks the 12 month anniversary of the mandatory use of CCMS for care cases and there have been many ups and downs for the LAA’s system (arguably significantly more of the latter!). The flaws of CCMS are generally widely documented; in this article I want to explore briefly two problematic aspects of the billing process that are not always highlighted.
Appeal bills
Following an assessment of your costs by the LAA you have the right to appeal the assessment to an independent costs assessor. In non CCMS cases simply setting out the nature of the appeal sufficed; however matters became more complicated with the introduction of CCMS. In order to appeal items that have been reduced you have to create a new bill and enter all of the items that you want to have reinstated. So for example if you had 10 items of 6 minutes removed you now need to prepare an appeal bill consisting of those 10 items of 6 minutes. Alternatively if you had an entry of 2 hours reduced to 1 hour and you wanted to contest that you would need to put this item back into the appeal bill as the amount you want to get back (1 hour). The total value of the appeal bill will be the amount that you want to have reinstated.
This causes some problems:
We are left with a situation where the time taken to prepare the appeal bill may outweigh the potential gain. In some situations Solicitors may end up taking a pragmatic view and deciding not to appeal – especially when it is simply a disagreement about the reasonableness of time spent and there is no guarantee of success. This would be a worrying turn of events as we could see overly harsh or incorrect applications of costs guidance go unchallenged on a regular basis due to the administrative burden of the appeal.
In my view consideration must be given to scrapping the existing appeal bill process for a simpler, less time consuming process that is more akin to the process for non CCMS cases. It is surely not beyond the realms of possibility for additional payments to be authorised by the LAA without the need for a further bill to be created.
Nil bills
In cases where certificates are obtained for more than one client, one of the certificates is set to be the ‘lead certificate’ and all billing takes place under that certificate in CCMS. Unfortunately however to conclude matters a nil bill must be entered for all linked certificates.
Although not a very lengthy process it does however need to be done for each individual certificate, so collectively time can mount up (e.g. if you are acting for say 4 children). The process involves passing through various questions before arriving at the section where you specify that it is simply a nil bill.
Ideally it would have made sense if the submission of a final bill for the lead certificate automatically entered a nil bill against the linked certificates. Alternatively, if a nil bill is to continue to be recorded against the certificate, it would make it far easier if the option to enter a nil bill came at the beginning of the billing process which would avoid the need to click through various screens answering questions that will ultimately have no bearing upon the bill being submitted.
Both of these issues have been known for some time and nothing has been done to improve them. A message that rang loud and clear when problems were highlighted during the pilot and beyond was ‘we need to manage your expectations’; in a nutshell this meant that a cost/benefit analysis would be applied to proposed changes. Unfortunately many of the problems with CCMS are as a result of insufficient insight into the needs of the user when creating the system and/or insufficient flexibility therein preventing significant changes being made inexpensively. There is arguably a long way to go before the system can truly be deemed to be 'fit for purpose' and it is important that any problems with the system continue to be highlighted.
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Friday 27th January 2017
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