Civil news: improving quality of family advocacy online claims
Making online claims under the Family Advocacy Scheme should be helped by changes to the Client and Cost Management System (CCMS).
Changes have been made to CCMS to help improve the quality of the online claims you make under the Family Advocacy Scheme (FAS).
The idea is to make it more likely that your claim will not be rejected, so avoiding the need for work to be resubmitted.
How will the changes work?
Improvements are being made to CCMS to enforce fee scheme rules for hearings claimed under FAS. These mean that it will no longer be possible to claim:
- FAS hearing and bolt-on activities within the same category of work
- above allowed amounts per case
An example would be where a claim for a third advocates’ bundle for an interim hearing is claimed. Where this happens CCMS will now display an error message and will not allow the bill to progress.
CCMS will also prevent issues such as claiming for:
- an interim hearing and final hearing advocates’ bundle on the same day
- over-claiming of Counsel conference fees
Check before claiming
Counsel and providers may need to check with another where court bundles are being claimed to ensure the correct information is entered.
In the event of issues, the first action should be to liaise with the instructed parties on a case. This is preferable to calling the Legal Aid Agency to check who has claimed the bundle.