O’Callaghan focusing on reforms that are ‘emphatically not at the lucrative end of legal practice’

Dublin solicitor Michael Hennessy was the top-earning solicitor under the State criminal legal aid scheme at €970,000 last year but that falls well short of the €8.8 million paid to Cian O’Carroll, the highest-paid medical negligence solicitor, by the State Claims Agency.

Legal costs, and the State’s role regarding legal reform and cost-savings, are again under the spotlight due to the bitter dispute over the Minister for Justice’s new criminal legal aid payment model for the District Courts introduced on July 1st.

The model, under which one flat fee of €520 would be paid per case irrespective of complexity or the number of court appearances, sparked a withdrawal of services by many criminal defence solicitors that continues to cause serious disruption and the adjournment of thousands of cases.

The dispute has generated debate on financial incentives in the criminal justice system but questions are also being asked about the scale of fees paid in non-criminal courts.

Donncha O’Connell, established professor of law at the University of Galway and an advocate for overall reform of the legal system, is concerned fee considerations should not adversely impact on access to justice or turn the courts into “juristic casinos for the rich”.

“Any legal system worth its salt must aim to guarantee access to justice for all, and this imperative requires that great care and attention be paid to ensuring sufficient balance within the system.”

Criminal legal aid work, says O’Connell, “is emphatically not at the lucrative end of legal practice, and nor is the type of work covered by our demonstrably inadequate scheme of civil legal aid”.

The justice system, he said, should not “tilt too much towards catering to the demands of ‘big law’ and corporate entities” while access to justice for ordinary people “is provided in conditions of permanent austerity”, resulting in “real and lasting damage to the administration of justice and to the fair trial rights of ordinary people”.

[ Minister and Law Society agree on ‘focused’ engagement aimed at resolving legal aid rowOpens in new window ]

This week Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan, agreed with Law Society representatives to embark on a process of “short, focused” engagement from Friday into next week aimed at resolving the dispute.

O’Callaghan has pointed to the increased spend on criminal legal aid in the District Courts from €19 million in 2015 to €37 million in 2024. He says the new model is necessary to address “abuses” of the old system, including the number of applications for multiple legal aid certificates, and to achieve efficiencies and costs savings in the public interest, while solicitors want changes to ensure they are paid for their work in more complex cases.

O’Connell said his concerns about the new flat-fee structure include it “could incentivise guilty pleas”. That may “be music to the ears of certain law and order zealots” but could mean “a real and foreseeable risk of premature guilty pleas in cases where essential pretrial processes are dispensed with on the basis of legal advice conditioned more by fee considerations than the interests of justice”.

In the wider legal context, O’Connell says the State “is never slow to hire the most expensive lawyers when it comes to defending its own interests”.

“Despite protestations that it behaves like ‘a model litigant’, the State will shamelessly justify this as a necessary defence of the public purse. This approach can be especially vociferous when litigants act in the public interest and its impact can be quite oppressive,” the law professor says.

[ Minister and Law Society agree on ‘focused’ engagement aimed at resolving legal aid rowOpens in new window ]

He is also concerned about policy being formed in a context of data deficits in the justice sector.

He says “selective” use of anecdotal evidence, and a reliance on “incomplete or insufficiently contextualised data” by O’Callaghan and his spokespeople during the current dispute has “had a distorting impact on the debate and, ultimately, on public understanding of the issues”.

It is “essential” that efforts at reform are evidence-led and such evidence is grounded on reliable data, he said.

The criminal legal aid row has focused attention on criminal legal aid costs but the much higher costs levels in the civil courts has been subject of criticism for decades.

High Court judge Michael Twomey has been particularly outspoken, including about the role of State laws in creating a system for resolving civil disputes that “defies all logic” and benefits legal professionals at the expense of failed litigants.

That observation was made in a judgment last December dismissing a woman’s appeal over the rejection of her damages claim for soft tissue injuries in a road incident.

The judge slammed the “systematic unfairness” that meant she faced legal costs of €50,000 over her €16,500 claim.

He said laws setting low monetary thresholds for the courts’ financial jurisdiction – up to €15,000 in the District Court, €15,000 to €60,000 in the Circuit Court and over €60,000 in the High Court – mean cases of minor value and importance can end up in the most expensive courts, potentially resulting in costs of tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of euro.

Examples cited by him included the High Court dealing with an appeal from the Residential Tenancies Board concerning a €500 deposit and a judicial review over an €80 car clamping fee.

Twomey also pointed to a “dramatic reduction” over recent decades in the proportion of affordable courts to hear minor claims. He noted a 359 per cent reduction in the number of District Courts relative to the number of High Courts, and a 54 per cent reduction in the number of Circuit Courts relative to the High Court.

Contrasting the civil case structure with the criminal courts, where minor offences are only dealt with in the District Courts, he said the situation suggested a fundamental incoherence in the State’s approach to justice.

The “primary winners” from the concentration of litigation in the High Court are lawyers who are paid costs “out of all proportion to the value of claims” while the “primary losers” are the consumers of legal services who have to pay those costs.

Noting repeated calls over years by judges for reduced legal fees had met with little success, Twomey suggested a structural solution, that only serious cases are tried in the civil division of the High Court. This would involve raising the monetary jurisdictions of the lower courts and potentially increasing the number of judges there to handle the increased caseload.

In their roles mainly as defendants in a huge volume of civil litigation, the State and its agencies are well acquainted with high legal costs.

The State Claims Agency manages such claims with a view to containing the State’s liability and its legal costs unit seeks to achieve that by means including mediation and settlements of cases in cases it deems appropriate.

Other steps aimed at legal costs savings included the introduction in 2021 of Judicial Council guidelines reducing personal injury awards for mainly minor injuries, and limits on applicants’ legal fees in High Court planning and environmental judicial reviews.

At the end of 2025, the SCA had 10,668 active claims, involving an estimated outstanding liability of €5.46 billion. Clinical claims represented 38 per cent of the number of claims and 81 per cent (€4.43 billion) of the estimated outstanding liability.

Legal and other costs amounted to €164 million in 2025, down €10.6 million on the 2024 figure. The agency’s legal and other costs were €44.8 million in 2025 while plaintiffs’ legal costs were €64.9 million.

Last year the costs unit settled 2,080 bills of legal costs claiming more than €240 million for just over €143 million, a saving of more than 40 per cent. In relation to 370 clinical negligence legal costs claims in 2025 for €98.5 million, the costs negotiated were €61.2 million, a saving of almost 38 per cent.

The top-earning clinical negligence firm was Cian O’Carroll Solicitors, paid €8.8 million in connection with 32 claims. Cantillons Solicitors were the second highest earners at €5.8 million in relation to 18 claims. The plaintiffs’ costs include payments to barristers and experts and are inclusive of VAT.

The Medical Protection Society, which provides indemnity cover for about 16,000 medical professionals here, has consistently complained that legal costs in Irish medical negligence cases are among the highest in the world. Last July it said the average legal cost for a claim managed by it here is €38,673, almost three times the average €13,202 cost in the UK. A claim here takes just over four years to resolve, more than 60 per cent longer than the UK, it added.

All of this suggests that, after the dispute over criminal legal aid is resolved, the State has much more work to do to effectively tackle legal costs.