The Legal Services Consumer Panel is currently conducting research looking at the impact of professionalised McKenzie friends in the wake of the cuts to legal aid- the report of this research will be added to this page when complete. If you have any suggestions for further resources please email: n dot l dot byrom at warwick dot ac dot uk

Author	Title	Description of resource	Related topics
Bevan, C (2013)	Self-represented litigants: the overlooked and unintended consequence of legal aid reform	The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) has lead to an increase in the number of self-representing litigants (SRLs) in the family courts. Taking a practitioner focus, this article considers the negative impact of this increase and considers possible measures for combating the practical pitfalls such a growth in SRLs presents.	Family Law, Litigants in person
Community Links (2009)	Time well-spent: The importance of one to one relationships between advice workers and their clients	Report demonstrating that the quality of the human relationship between the person delivering public services and the person using public services is an important factor in achieving quality.	Civil Law, Quality
James, D. et al. (2012)	Empathy and Expertise: Case Workers and Immigration/Asylum Applicants in London	This article explores the contradictory character of one-on-one relationships between case workers and clients. Despite pressures produced by cuts to legal aid to quantify their work in “value for money” terms, the empathy that often motivates case workers drives them to provide exceptional levels of aid to their clients in facing an arbitrary bureaucracy. Such personalized commitment may persuade applicants to accept the decisions of that bureaucracy, thus reinforcing a hegemonic understanding of the power of the law.	Immigration Law, Civil Law, Empathy, Expertise
Masson, J. (2011)	Public child law- A service priority?	Article argues that despite a rhetoric of protecting service quality, little account has been taken of clients' needs in the mechanisms for quality assessment. Reductions in the supply of lawyers and in service quality threaten access to justice for parents despite the retention of Legal Aid for public child law	Family Law, Quality
McDermont, M. (2012)	Acts of translation: UK advice agencies and the creation of matters-of-public-concern	Drawing on ideas from the ‘sociology of translation’, this paper sets out to consider the multiple, complex roles adopted by advice agencies. They are involved not simply in the delivery of advice to individuals, but in a collective concern that translates personal grievances into matters-of-public-concern. The paper concludes by considering the implications for an emerging research agenda that considers advice organizations as legal actors in a fragmenting world.	Civil Law, Charities, Legal Translation
McEwen, J. (2011)	From adversarialism to managerialism: criminal justice in transition	Academic article foreshadows concerns about the impact of cuts to legal aid on the adversarial system in England and Wales.	Criminal Law, Managerialism
Newman, D. (2012)	Still standing accused: addressing the gap between work and talk in firms of criminal defence lawyers	This paper presents findings from the largest survey of its kind for fifteen years. In order to update understanding of this branch of the profession, participant observation and formal interviews are utilised to elucidate something of the health of the lawyer–client relationship as it currently stands. The results challenge the prospect of achieving access to criminal justice, as lawyers degrade their clients. However, this is deemed to be caused by a misalignment of values that might be rectified if lawyers are encouraged to become more ethically self-aware.	Criminal Law, Ethics
Smith, T. (2013)	Trust, choice and money: why the legal aid reform "u-turn" is essential for effective criminal defence	Short article exploring the link between trust and effective criminal defence in the context of government proposals to cut the budget for criminal legal aid.	Criminal Law, Trust