LexisNexis GLP Index: criminal law

Will demand for criminal legal expertise grow, decline or simply stay the same in 2023?

The LexisNexis GLP Index pulls together the latest datapoints to provide some powerful predictions on the future of criminal law.

Criminal lawyers should expect a steady decline in work in 2023.

That's according to the latest GLP Index, which pulls from hundreds of datapoints to predict demand for legal expertise across multiple practice areas.

To measure the demand for criminal law expertise as a practice area, the GLP Index looked at a broad range of datapoints. This included everything from criminal justice statistics, to Crown Court trials, to Civil Court figures.

The index revealed that demand for criminal law is steadily decreasing over the years. In 2018 and 2019 it fell by -6% and -2% respectively, and in 2020 during the height of the pandemic, it feel sharply by -26%.

There was a small growth in 2021, when demand increased by +8% compared to 2020, but this dipped by -2% in 2022 and is expected to dip again in 2023 as a whole.

Scroll down for in-depth research and analysis on the key trends driving change across criminal law.

Criminal law is predicted to generate by 4% less work in 2023 than in 2022

To get a measure for the overall demand for legal representation across criminal courts, we pulled data from the Ministry of Justice's Criminal Justice Statistics Quarterly into our index.

This data revealed that the number of defendants proceeded against, offenders convicted and offenders sentenced has decreased over time.

The number of defendants proceeded against in 2022 sat at 1.14 million. This is relatively similar to figures seen in 2020 and 2021, which sat at 1.12 million and 1.07 million respectively. However, both 2018 and 2019 saw 200,000 more defendants proceeded against than in recent years.

The data for offenders convicted and offenders sentenced tells a very similar story. In 2022, just over a million offenders were convicted across England and Wales, and a similar amount were sentenced.

The Ministry of Justice has just released a new dashboard - Criminal justice system delivery data dashboard - that gives an overview of the justice system; from the point a crime is recorded by the police, to when a case is completed in court.

Read guidance on commencing criminal proceeding

The number of defendants proceeded against, offenders convicted and offenders sentenced has declined significantly

The number of receipts and disposals for Crown Court cases has been steadily declining. Since 2018, the total number of receipts has tinkered around the 100,000 mark. In 2016 through to 2018, disposals outnumbers receipts - yet this has declined in 2019 through to 2021.

The number of outstanding cases has climbed steadily in recent years, no doubt as a result of the pandemic.

The latest figures for 2022 show the outstanding caseload increased by 6% from 59,473 at the end of June 2022 to 62,766 at end of September 2022 (more than a quarter of which have been open for a year or more).

The median time from offence to completion at the Crown Court currently sits at 349 days (as of Q3 2022) – considerably higher than pre-COVID levels (252 days in 2019).

Data also revealed the ineffective trial rate at the Crown Court increased from 31% in the Q2 2022 to 56% in Q3 2022 – well above levels seen between 2014 and 2019 (13%-19%). The main reason for this is suggested to be a lack of defence advocate availability as well as limited access to legal aid.

The pandemic presented a range of challenges to the day-to-day running of the criminal courts, causing major backlogs that have proven difficult to alleviate.

Total case receipts and disposals for the magistrates' courts in England and Wales sat close to 1.5 million between 2016 and 2019. This plummeted down to just over 1 million during the pandemic, and made a small rise in 2021.

The number of outstanding cases, however, jumped significantly in 2020 by almost 10,000 - and had only reduced by 3,000 by the end of 2021.

The latest quarterly figures for the time from offence to completion at the magistrates’ court show fell by 6% in Q3 2022 when compared with the previous quarter, from 189 to 178. However, it remains well above pre-COVID levels, which sat at 162 days for 2019.

The number of Civil Court proceedings started in 2020 were noticeably lower than in recent years, with just under 1.3 million cases coming into fruition. A stark contrast compared to 2019's 2 million+.

The number of proceedings started increased by an additional 300,000 in 2021, sitting just shy of 1.6 million.

However, this seems likely to rise even further in 2022 overall, with the latest data showing 410,999 cases for Q1 2022, 375,484 for Q2 2022, and 389,290 for Q3 2022. This puts total figures for 2022 so far at 1.175 million (or 74%).

The number of claims that made it to trial in the Civil Court have increased after a noticeably lower 2020. In 2020 - the year the pandemic struck - 45,200 claims made it to trial, while in 2021, 53,675 claims made it to trial. This shows numbers have returned to near-normal levels, although still 10k down from 2019's 64,754.

The latest figures for 2022 show 13,653 claims made it to trial in Q1 2022, 12,656 in Q2 2022, and 13,142 in Q3 2022. This puts the number of claims that have made it to trial during 2022 at 39,451, or 74% of 2021's numbers.

The mean amount of time between issue and trials is gradually increasing over time. In Q1 2016, the mean amount of time sat at 54.4 weeks, while the latest figures show the average wait time sits at 75.5 weeks for Q3 2022.

We can see a sharp rise to wait time when the pandemic struct during 2020, where wait time jumped from 62.1 weeks in Q4 2020 to 74.0 weeks.