Legal Aid BC (LABC) has a longstanding interest in ensuring legal aid clients receive quality services. We have a number of existing measures to promote quality service and to respond to situations where concerns about service quality arise. Recently, the BC Office of the Auditor General (OAG) audited LABC for the period of April 1, 2023, to August 31, 2024, releasing its final report on April 29, 2025. One of the OAG’s key recommendations was that LABC define and monitor quality expectations for its contracted legal aid representation services.
As a result, LABC has initiated a project to develop and implement a Lawyer Quality Assurance (QA) Framework that will guide our efforts to expand our QA measures in future years. This work will proceed in phases, with Phase 1, running from October 2025 to March 2026, aiming to develop a draft framework that will provisionally define clear and consistent quality standards and identify the mechanisms needed to ensure they are met. LABC expects to begin implementation of the QA Framework in 2026/27 but full implementation will likely take several years.
LABC has prepared a short discussion paper summarizing the aims of the current Quality Assurance Framework project. You can find the discussion paper here.
We are inviting lawyers and other interested and impacted parties, including justice system participants and agencies, to provide us with input on how LABC should ensure legal aid clients receive quality service. We are seeking a wide range of perspectives and will be grateful for any input we receive. You may wish to consider some of the following questions in preparing your response:
- How should Legal Aid BC define high quality legal representation services?
- What are the most important aspects or features of high quality legal representation services?
- What measures should Legal Aid BC adopt to ensure its clients receive high quality legal services?
- What specific measures should Legal Aid BC adopt to ensure that lawyers provide high quality legal representation services to vulnerable clients or those from equity seeking groups that face systemic barriers and discrimination.
- When Legal Aid BC identifies problems or concerns regarding the quality of legal representation services, what measures should it take to respond?
- What else should Legal Aid BC consider when looking at ways to improve the quality of legal representation services?
You may send your submissions or comments to the project email address: lawyerqaframework@legalaid.bc.ca. The closing date for submissions is January 17, 2026. Please note that all submissions we receive will be treated as confidential. We will summarize and report on the comments we receive but will do so without attribution unless we have express permission to do so.
We appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective, and value your input as we work to develop new approaches to ensure legal aid clients receive quality services.