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Lord Justice Jackson yesterday called on the government not to withdraw legal aid from clinical negligence work. He also criticised the Law Society for conducting a single campaign against the legal aid cuts and his reforms of civil costs “as if they are a composite package”.

A bid by opposition MPs to increase the amount of time they have to hear evidence and scrutinise the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill failed earlier this week. The committee stage also saw a Conservative MP exploit divisions between the Law Society and Bar Council on whether money can be saved from the legal aid budget by reducing payments to barristers.

Low-level personal injury claims bucked the trend that saw a dramatic double-digit dip in the volume of civil litigation during 2010, Ministry of Justice figures have shown. The 2010 statistics show an almost universal fall in the volume of work going through all levels of UK civil courts last year.

A leading disability charity has mounted a judicial review of the government’s civil costs reforms, saying ministers have failed to consider properly “the devastating impact” their proposals could have on disabled people.

After all the breathless anticipation, we rather got what we were expecting yesterday on legal aid and the Jackson reforms – full steam ahead into the parliamentary process, with the odd tweak of the former (the tweaks of the latter having already been announced in March). I have written before that alternative business structures (ABSs) are the bigger picture of the Jackson reforms, and surely the same goes for legal aid, albeit for different reasons.