The RMJ was formerly the Refugee Legal Centres (RLC), which were located at centres throughout the UK. The RLC was a private limited company funded through the Legal Services Commission.
The Refugee Legal Centres (RLC) commissioned the first version of RIPS in 1996.
Under the guidance of an enterprising entrepreneur, RIPS was refined to the needs of asylum seeker processes in the UK. Extensive time and work practice tuning was done to minimise the cost of processing asylum seekers.
As a result of their success, the RMJ managed to reduce the average cost of processing each asylum seeker and managed to process asylum seekers much faster than ever before. Unfortunately the government of the time responded by offering lower hourly rates for caseworkers to process claims, and the RMJ was forced into administration.
After their demise, the law firms and NGOs were asked to process these claims. The average cost of processing asylum claims rose dramatically and each claim took much longer, because the law firms had case management systems, which were not tuned to processing asylum cases.
The legacy of the RMJ was a superb case management system, which was tuned to process asylum claims fast and efficiently. ANS wrote the following extensions to RIPS to streamline their activities:
- a case library was added so that caseworkers could access key case histories and guidance to expedite their cases.
- a disbursement solution was added so that specialists servicing clients could be reimbursed for their services.
- a ‘bundle maker’ and indexing tool was added to allow the rapid production of legal ‘bundles’ for UK courts.
- time monitoring because some types of case were reimbursed based on units of 6 minutes
- ‘totters’ were added so that asylum claims reaching government-set budgetary limits for a specific case type could be identified and tracked.
- a booking system for interpreters and translators to ensure that caseworkers were never held back by language barriers.
Over 350 caseworkers had been trained by the RMJ. After leaving the RMJ to join law firms and NGOs, they encouraged the adoption of RIPS, and RIPS went global.