Fee Data Collection System - A Guide

This Data Collection System is designed to let you quickly add information about a selection of your cases. Three types of information are involved: experts, cases and activities. Before exploring these three categories, the following explains the way the system works.

How it works

In order to preserve confidentiality, you can only access the system through our secure server and with a unique access code. This code will provide you with access only to the data you have added.

Initial set up

When you first access the system you will be asked if you will be adding more than one expert. If yes, you can then set a group name, which may well just be your company name.

Setting default fee rates

You will then be asked to set standard hourly charging rates for the various pre-defined activities. Activities are a detailed record of work done in a case. Setting your standard hourly charging rates may save you time when you start to add data because they are used to pre-populate the input form. The 10 pre-defined activities cover a good range of the typical activities involved in the conduct of a case. But if it makes sense to you, you can add custom activities at this stage. Simply click the Add new type of activity button and provide a short name, a description and the standard hourly fee rate. It is not mandatory to add activities to the cases you enter, but it is likely that some real insights of value to the MoJ will come from the activity records.

Add the first expert

Once you have saved changes on the activities screen, you will be asked to add your first expert. You need to add at least one expert, although the system will allow as many experts to be added as you need. If you are an expert who operates alone, just enter your own details. If you are supplying data from a company that will be providing information about a number of experts, you can enter them all - either at the initial set up stage or as you go. The details here will help to characterise the person doing the work, and add a layer of context to the case data you input.

The JSP UID is optional and just helps us to link your input into our existing data framework. The expertise field is important because it is from here that we will categorise work done within the MoJ’s categorisation scheme. Seniority is a measure of the expert’s relative experience and is simply the number of years of active professional work, i.e. not just years as an expert witness.

The three sliders, which range from 0-100%, measure

• the percentage of your work that is expert witness work
• the percentage of your expert witness work that is paid out of public funds (either LSC or CPS)
• the percentage of your total business income that is paid from public funds.

Adding a case

Having added an expert you will see the control panel which prompts you to add another expert or add a case (you can’t add an activity until you have a case to which to assign it).

To add a case, choose the expert who did the work (so you need to have added the expert before trying to add the case). Then enter a file reference. This should identify the case to you (so, for example, you can access the case easily should the MoJ want more information on it). Next add the name of the instructor, preferably the name of the law firm. If you can, a postcode should be added because this will help to reveal any geographical variability in the data set we build. Whilst a full postcode, e.g. CB8 7SG, is preferred, the system will allow you to enter just the first bit, i.e. CB8.

The work type drop down lets you specify the court and case type. If you have to pick any of the Other options, please be sure to add a comment to the case to explain what court/work type was involved. The funder in publicly funded work is usually either the LSC or the CPS. If you have some other public paymaster, please say which in the comment box.

The number of parties is how many parties were involved in the case, and the number of instructors is how many of the parties instructed you.

The three sliders, which range from 0-10, aim to gain a measure of some less tangible characteristics:

• complexity - was the case more or less complex that the ‘normal’ type of case the expert does?
• centrality - was the subject of the matter of the work more or less central to the overall thrust of the litigation than ‘normal’? We recognise that this won’t always be known, as experts don’t necessarily have the overview of a case to make this assessment possible. In that case, leave the slider at zero.
• gravity - was the work on a matter that was more or less serious than your ‘normal’ case load?

Of course, what is normal is not clear cut, but we feel that some measure of the relative complexity, centrality and gravity of the work will help to contextualise any variations in fees.

The total fee is the (VAT exclusive) fee you charged for the case and the total time is the number of hours and minutes logged to the work. Dividing these would give an averaged fee/hour for the case. The key dates will help us to build a time series of the data and analyse delayed payment. We are looking in particular for cases run since Jan 2009 and would expect all cases to at least have a billed on date set.

The comment box is no after-thought! The MoJ is looking to see if it can define discrete blocks of activity to which it can assign fixed or sliding fee rates. If there are aspects of the case that moved your fee rate away from your average fee rate, and those aspects aren’t captured in the complexity, centrality and gravity sliders, please note them in the comment box.

Adding activities to cases

Once you have some cases in the system, you can go on to add activities. Having a summary of the case is good, but not all activities in a case are equal. So, if you have the information to hand, you can provide a more detailed insight into the work done on a case by adding activity records. It is this detailed record of the work that goes into a case that is likely to provide the insights necessary for the MoJ to develop a payment regime that pays experts ‘fairly’ for the work they actually do.

First select the case to which this activity relates. Then pick the activity from the drop down list. The hourly fee rate will change to reflect the default rate you set up initially. Of course, you may change the rate if in this case you charged a different fee. The duration is how long this activity took, expressed in hours and minutes separated by a colon, e.g. 4:45 means four hours and 45 minutes.

The three sliders, which range from 0-10, have the same meaning as before but this time refer just to the activity, not to the overall case. This will allow, for example, particulary complex activities in a case to be drawn out from the overall average fee rate. This is the sort of information that will help stop the MoJ setting damagingly unrealistic average fee rates.

As for the case input dialog box, the comment box allows you to bring out reasons for fee variations not explained elsewhere, and those insights may well help us to get the MoJ to better focus it scheme on the important aspects of expert witness work.

The control panel

Every time you finish adding an expert, a case or an activity, you will end back at the control panel. This lets you add a new expert, case or activity. If you close the control panel you will see the main screen that shows the experts, cases and activities you have added. You can click an expert to see his or her details. You can click a case to see any activities assigned to that case. To edit an existing expert, case or activity, click the blue id number. To delete an expert, case or activity, click the relevant red cross - but take care as deletions can’t be undone, and deleting an expert would remove all the linked cases and activities.