Development of Apply for Criminal Legal Aid Service

View the funding decision of a criminal legal aid application in your LAA online portal with the new functionality rolled out for Apply for criminal legal aid

Apply for criminal legal aid service was successfully implemented as a replacement for the eForms service in September 2024. The service became mandatory for all criminal legal aid applications in November 2024.

A search functionality was released in November 2024, to allow providers to search submitted and returned applications within Apply for criminal legal aid. We will continue to improve the search function based on provider feedback.

New Functionality Release

We recently released an outcome feature within the service that allows you to be able to view the funding decision of a criminal legal aid application in your LAA online portal.

Representation orders, contribution notices, and refusal notices will not be visible and will still be emailed to you.

You will now find applications that have been processed by LAA under the new “Decided” tab. You can view the funding decision inside the full application details screen, along with any comments left by caseworkers. A reminder to always read caseworker comments as they may contain crucial information about the funding decision.

This feature will make it easier to see when an application has been processed and the outcome of that application. 

Looking Forward

As you will have seen from the releases detailed above, functionality that we release for Apply for criminal legal aid may not be the final version and we aim to keep developing the features wherever possible.  We will continue to expand the functionality of the service, listening to feedback from providers to deliver a more accessible, user-friendly platform.