History of the organisation
In 2004, there was very little legal advice available in the London Borough of Ealing in the social welfare fields; the Citizens Advice Bureau was closing and there was no Law Centre or equivalent. Law For All was established to fill that gap.
Ulla Barlow and Anna Barlow are mother and daughter. Anna had recently qualified as a solicitor and Ulla was a former Director of Education for the London Borough of Ealing, then working on a diplomats programme in Central London. They combined their skills to set up Law For All, to provide much-needed services and also as an experiment to see whether social welfare law services could be financially viable on legal aid funding alone. In order to satisfy Law Society requirements, a part-time senior solicitor was employed, together with a part-time secretary, and the doors of our first office, at 102 Acton High Street, were opened. Despite initial fears that client demand would not be sufficient to keep the service running, we saw three clients the first day and use of the service continued to grow.
From those very early days, we were strengthened by the support of Clifford Chance and Bindman & Partners and by the pro bono time given to our clients by numerous sets of barristers’ chambers, in particular 1 Grays Inn Square and Cloisters.
By 2000 we had grown to employ 17 lawyers, including trainee solicitors, and had begun to offer services from several other offices around the London Borough of Ealing, including Southall, Hanwell and Northolt.
Links with local community organisations were growing and some services were offered from their premises, such as at the Viking Community Centre in Northolt. As the Legal Services Commission launched local Community Legal Services Partnerships, we became more closely involved with policy work and the local network of advice providers.
In late 2003 we won a joint contract from the London Borough of Ealing and the Legal Services Commission to provide additional services at generalist and specialist level within the borough. The funding enabled us to employ more lawyers to carry out casework, and also to set up our Access service, which ensures that enquiries from potential clients are dealt with at the most appropriate level. We also set up additional services for hard-to-reach groups at community organisations such as Age Concern, Ealing Centre for Independent Living and MIND.
Throughout the early 2000s, numerous consultations were issued by the Legal Services Commission, to which Law For All responded. We have broadly supported the moves towards greater quality assurance and value for money, whilst taking issue with some of the poor theory and planning by the government.
The pro bono link with Clifford Chance continued to thrive, growing to include the secondment of sixteen Clifford Chance trainee solicitors each year on three month rotations, together with assistance with our own leases and other legal needs.
In 2005 one of our valued senior solicitors, Peter Finn, decided to move out of to an area which lacked advice provision. Not wanting to stop working with Peter, we gained funding from the Cambridge office of the Legal Services Commission and opened an office in Thetford, Norfolk. This venture has enabled us to understand the different challenges facing providers in rural settings, in particular the difficulties of establishing client awareness of services when the pockets of deprivation are remote from each other. After a slow start, this service is now running well and the East Anglian branch of our operations has expanded to Cambridgeshire, where the private equity firm Permira is providing seed funding to set up services.
Over the last 13 years Law For All has expanded from three staff to a total of 69. We help approximately 15,000 people per year.