At north Liverpool’s Community Justice Centre, Judge David Fletcher and his colleagues have a mandate that echoes one of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s most famous slogans: to tackle both crime and the causes of crime.

The centre, which serves 80,000 people in four local authority wards, includes a courtroom, members of the Probation Service and other agencies, and experts specialising in areas such as drugs, housing and debt. “Together, they aim to make sure offenders repay their debt to the local community, while at the same time addressing the underlying issues that contribute to… offending,” the centre says.

The project, a pilot in a national scheme overseen by the Ministry of Justice, is one of the leading entries in the new public sector category of the Innovative Lawyer report (click here for rankings).

The dozen public sector innovations included in the table cover a wide range of subjects, from job sharing by the elite Treasury solicitors to the strategies used by the BBC to fight libel cases.

Although the entries are generally smaller in number and more piecemeal in composition than those in some of the private sector categories, they do give the lie to the stereotype that legal innovation in the public sector is so rare as to be all but invisible.

The BBC’s entry – winner by a comfortable three-point margin – highlights how a group of lawyers can combine the task of servicing a big organisation’s many legal needs with a strategic approach to solving systemic problems (see the article on the next page).

Runner-up to the corporation is Kent County Council, which is one of the first local authority legal teams to sell advice to outsiders. Kent Legal Services now has a turnover of £6m and more than 150 public sector clients, which it claims leaves it “well placed to match and often exceed whatever the private sector can offer”.

The Kent lawyers have campaigned – they say successfully – for a relaxation of professional rules that prevent them working for private sector clients. They plan to launch a website offering legal services to the commercial sector via the internet, at fixed prices payable by credit card.

Most strikingly, the Kent lawyers have established a system under which they exchange work placements, peer reviews and ideas with their counterparts in the US state of Virginia, which was settled by many Kentish people four centuries ago.

Third on the public sector podium is West Yorkshire Police, which has helped turn what was once a detectives’ training manual known as the Police National Legal Database into a widely-accessible source of refereed law. The existing and envisaged users of the service – which includes a database comprising hundreds of frequently asked questions – are the general public, police officers, the Crown Prosecution Service and solicitors.

An article in Justice of the Peace, a legal journal, says the database is intended to help people address a wide range of legal problems: these include mundane queries about what you should do if you see a stray dog, as well as more serious questions about whom to tell if you think your neighbour is keeping explosives in his garage.

“According to the old saying: ‘If you want to know the time, ask a policeman,’” the article concludes. “In the networked knowledge society,” the article concludes, “that police officer may in future be as likely to be represented by the [national legal database] website as by a real individual with a pointed helmet.”

Outside of the top four, highly commended entries from Transport for London, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and the Office of Fair Trading all share the theme of pooling and deepening legal expertise, whether through working more closely with policy colleagues internally or building links with outside counterpart bodies such as Singapore’s Land Transport Authority.

The group of commended entries features three government departments – the Treasury, the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department of Health – with each cited for using private sector-style techniques, such as industry secondments, psychometric testing and risk analysis.

The other commended entry, from the Scottish Borders Council, Scottish Courts Service and Lothian and Borders police, has a community justice theme that neatly echoes that of the north Liverpool centre.

In common with other entrants in this category, the Merseyside community justice centre presents itself as public spirited in the broadest sense, offering its services to all north Liverpool residents, rather than just offenders, victims and witnesses.

As an example of its responsiveness to community concerns, the centre cites a November 2005 crackdown on kerb crawlers in which Judge Fletcher issued those convicted with driving disqualifications, so they could not move their offending to other areas.

“The case received a great deal of interest from the local media,” the centre says. “Quotes from local residents showed they were pleased their concerns had been addressed quickly and effectively.”

Case study: Challenges across the channels

If libel lawyers for newspapers think they have it tough, they should spare a thought for their counterparts at the BBC. The corporation’s 20-strong in-house litigation and intellectual property team has to keep track each year of 11,000 hours of domestic television news programmes, seven national radio stations, and broadcasts in 33 languages on the World Service.

It is little wonder, perhaps, that the team says it takes “a broad view” of the legal challenges facing the organisation, focusing not only on fire-fighting specific problems but also on getting to the root of underlying difficulties.

The BBC lawyers’ entry – the convincing winner in the public sector law category – focuses partly on the litigation team’s work on dealing with the “no win, no fee” deals increasingly offered by lawyers to claimants under Britain’s notoriously strict libel laws.

The BBC lawyers say these so called “conditional fee arrangements” – under which the victorious lawyers charge up to double normal fees and recoup the money from defendants – are “having a significant impact on freedom of expression”.

“Media defendants, such as the BBC, when faced with a conditional fee-funded claim, have to balance independent reporting in the public interest with the costs of defending a claim in what is a very unpredictable area of law,” the BBC lawyers say.

The first prong of the corporation’s response is to introduce more efficient reporting procedures to senior management, enabling early decisions to be made as to whether to fight or settle in cases that could become very expensive. Where appropriate, the BBC will take the case on: it says it is the only broadcaster to have successfully defended a conditional fee-funded libel claim.

A second element of the BBC’s approach is a protocol it has agreed with David Price Solicitors & Advocates, a leading media law firm, over the conduct of conditional fee claims.

Under this agreement, the costs of new claims against the corporation are capped and any success fee reduced or eliminated if the claim is settled early. This lessens the financial drain of such cases and ensures the BBC receives recognition for promptly settling claims.

The third dimension of the BBC’s strategy is to lobby proactively for reform, which the corporation argues it is well placed to do because it has a better understanding than perhaps any other organisation of the uses and impact of conditional fee claims.

It has taken its case to the Ministry of Justice and to a Civil Justice Council scheme set up to allow mediation between conditional fee claimants and defendants – truly the heart of the lion’s den.