Tony Lenehan KC was the country's top legal aid earning advocate with fellow advocate Donald Findlay KC the second highest, new figures from the Scottish Legal Aid Board show.
Mr Lenehan's fees were £490,000 in 2024-2025 an increase of £40,000 on the previous year.
It is the third consecutive year that the criminal defence lawyer has topped the table of highest earning advocates published by the board.
Mr Findlay's fees were £370,000 an increase of £26,000 from the previous year. Mark Allison was third placed earning £366,000 from legal aid fees while Mark Stewart KC was fourth receiving £350,000.
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Fifth placed in the table was Brian McConnachie KC earning £340,000.
Thomas Ross KC, Joseph Scullion, John Brannigan were sixth, seventh and eighth with respective earnings of £340,000, £324,000 and £307,000.
The fees were published as part of SLAB annual report which revealed record legal aid spending of £169 million.
All twenty top earning advocates are listed in the table below from the report which also gives their earnings for the previous two years. Separate tables are given for individual law firms and for solicitor advocates.
Speaking on behalf the Faculty of Advocates, Mr Lenehan, Vice Dean of Faculty, said legal aid "plays a vital role in ensuring access to justice" for those who need it but cannot pay for it.
"The fees are paid according to the amount of work done, so high total fees represent a huge amount of work done by those advocates, in providing this important public service.
"Although the top earners’ figures make for dramatic reading as they are reported, it should be borne in mind that for self-employed people like advocates, a gross figure of, say, £120,000 is broadly equivalent to being paid an employee’s salary of under £50,000."
He added that all fees reported by the Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB) were gross earnings.
"Often for the self-employed advocate, 60, 70, and (especially for those high-level fee earners) 80-plus hour weeks are the norm," he said.
"Legal aid in Scotland is vitally important to the administration of justice. Reporting gross earnings inclusive of VAT is apt to mislead the reader, and sensible adjustment for the role of the self-employed puts the figures into proper context."
Mr Lenehan went onto say that solicitors in particular were increasingly struggling to fund a legal aid-based practice at the rates imposed on them "leading to a shortage of solicitors to help people who are often in the greatest need".
The SLAB annual report for the financial year ending March 31, 2025 revealed a 12% increase in spending from the previous year and the highest ever in cash terms and the highest since 2016-17 in real terms.
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It is understood the increase in spending and fees to advocates, most of whom work in criminal law, is due in part to trials becoming more complex, longer (sometimes lasting more than 20 to 30 days) and involving more accused using different lines of defence A backlog in criminal trials is also believed to have contributed to the legal aid spending rise.
However, the SLAB's annual lreport said that despite the 170,000 grants of legal assistance made in the year, the current legal aid system cannot guarantee access to a solicitor for everyone who needs one.
This was an issue highlighted in a hard-hitting series of articles "Scotland's Legal Aid Crisis" by The Herald earlier this year which examined the impact of a shortage of solicitors doing legal aid work on people requring legal help including women experiencing domestic abuse.
Solicitors told The Herald that the legal aid fees for their work and the hefty paper work involved had led to people in the profession moving into other higher paid areas of the law such as commercial and corporate work.
SLAB chief executive Colin Lancaster said the report highlighted systemic limitations.
"While our analysis doesn’t point to a national crisis, there are clear areas of concern that need to be addressed," he said. "The current system doesn’t let us secure services where and when they are needed or easily connect people to those services.
"A system created in the 1950s cannot solve problems it wasn’t designed for, or do so in the accessible, customer-focused ways we rightly expect of modern public services."
As well as the challenges faced in delivering legal aid services, the report also underlined achievements, financial performance and contributions to Scotland’s justice system over the past year.
Mr Lancaster welcomed the recommendations by Holyrood's equality, human rights and civil justice committee following its inquiry into civil legal aid.
The inquiry strongly backed the Law Society of Scotland’s calls for the Scottish Government to urgently increase civil legal aid fees and pursue reforms to restore access to justice.
The Report on the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee inquiry into Civil Legal Assistance in Scotland was published after a six-month investigation by MSPs.
The committee urged the Scottish Government to urgently “proceed with reforms to increase fees paid to legal practitioners”, and for further measures to be pursued as soon as possible including primary legislation to reform the civil legal aid system.
The SLAB annual report noted difficulties facing the service including in accessing solicitors for family law and housing cases, economic pressures facing the service amid rising costs and a need for investment in training and system upgrades to counter rising cybersecurity threats.
Minister for Victims and Community Safety Siobhian Brown said: “Legal aid spending reached record levels of £169 million last year, a 12% increase on the previous year, and the Scottish Government continues to meet all costs.
“We are taking forward actions to reform legal aid to ensure that we have an adaptable, flexible, affordable and sustainable legal aid system that supports people who need it.
“We recognise that legal professionals work hard to deliver legal aid and that improvement is needed.
"That is why we are taking forward reforms that will simplify the process for solicitors and those who need legal assistance, along with longer-term proposals for funding and improving the delivery of services.
“While the number of legal aid solicitors can fluctuate, we want to attract more people into the profession and we are working with the Scottish Legal Aid Board on the issue of solicitor availability.”
