Believe it or not, we need more solicitors

If you have the misfortune to be involved in a car crash in Ireland you will be four times more likely to go to court than if you had been in the same car crash in England. Once legal action has commenced, your solicitor is 16 times more likely to hire a junior counsel than his English counterpart. In almost one in five cases, he will hire a senior counsel while his English equivalent almost never hires the English equivalent - Queen's counsel.

Despite all this extra legal advice you will probably only get an average of £1,600 (€2,031) more than you would have got if your solicitor had hired no counsel and settled the case himself. Legal costs however will account for 43 per cent of your damages award, on average, if you get up to £15,000 and 26 per cent, on average, if you are awarded between £50,000 and £100,000.

These statistics underscore the need for the urgent overhaul of the Irish legal profession that was called for last week by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in its review of regulatory reform in Ireland.

The figures come from the recently published Second Report of the Special Working Group on Personal Injury Compensation. The section on legal costs makes interesting reading.

The working group looked at claims handled by one large insurance group operating in Ireland and England.

They found that formal legal proceedings were commenced in 73 per cent of cases in Ireland compared to only 16 per cent in England. "In Ireland the tendency was to issue proceedings rather than wait for negotiations to commence," according to the report.

A solicitor alone acted for the plaintiff in 90 per cent of English cases and a junior counsel was appointed in only 3 per cent of cases. In Ireland a junior counsel was appointed on behalf of the plaintiff in 48 per cent of claims and a senior counsel in 18 per cent. No senior counsel were appointed in any of the English cases.

Insurers engaged counsel in roughly 50 per cent of cases in Ireland compared to "little engagement in the English cases".

THEY also found that 60 per cent of Irish claims were settled with the involvement of counsel either in the Law Library or at the court house. In England the same proportion of cases was settled either by correspondence or on the telephone between claims handlers and the plaintiffs' solicitors.

The involvement of counsel in almost half of all cases meant that Irish cases took 3.6 times longer to settle on average than in the UK and this "significantly increases the legal cost of settlements in Ireland".

The report points out that "the appointment of counsel did not bring a corresponding increase in damages. On average the increase in general damages only amounted to £1,600 in Ireland or 16 per cent of average damages earned without use of counsel". The use of counsel, however, increased costs by 42 per cent.

The report went on to recommend the establishment of a Personal Injuries Assessment Board which would act as a forum to determine damages, but not liability. Under the constitution the issue of liability has to be open to resolution via the courts.

Simple economics would argue that increasing the supply of barristers and lawyers will bring down this cost. Not surprisingly the OECD has recommended that control of entry into the two professions should be taken away from the self-governing Law Society and its sister organisation, the Bar Council.

If the Government is serious about cutting legal costs it must explore ways of redressing the imbalance between solicitors and barristers. Increasing the number of solicitors should bring down solicitors' fees.

Reducing the number of barristers may push up their fees, but bring down legal costs overall as solicitors will have less access to them and have to do more work. Hard though it may seem to believe, we need more solicitors.

jmcmanus@irish-times.ie[