The establishment of an independent commission with responsibility for regulating the legal profession, the creation of a new profession of specialist "conveyancers" to help reduce the cost of property transactions and greater transparency in legal fees are among the major recommendations of the final report of the Competition Authority into the legal profession.
The report, published in Dublin yesterday, also calls for barristers to be allowed to form partnerships, the end of the "monopoly" over legal education provision enjoyed by the King's Inns and the Law Society, and the abolition of "unnecessary" restrictions on advertising by barristers and solicitors.
Elsewhere, it advocates greater transparency in the awarding of the title of senior counsel. Solicitors as well as barristers should be eligible, it says.
The Law Society and the Bar Council should also remove "unnecessary barriers" to practitioners switching between the branches of solicitor and barrister, while barristers should be allowed to represent their employers in court, the report recommends.
Legal costs should be "primarily assessed" on the basis of the work undertaken by individual lawyers, rather than on the basis of the size of the award "as is currently the case", it states. Similarly, taxing masters should "cease the general practice of allowing junior counsel's fees at two thirds that of senior counsel," while both solicitors and barristers should be required to issue "meaningful" fee estimate letters, with sanctions for solicitors who fail to do so. The authority also wants solicitors whose clients wish to switch to another solicitor to be obliged to hand over their files. Many clients are not aware of their rights when it comes to legal fees, the report states, but the public should be provided with full disclosure of their rights and how legal fees are determined.
Despite recent "welcome developments" such as the proposed creation of a legal services ombudsman and the publication of the report of the legal costs working group, the Competition Authority report says the legal profession in Ireland remains in need of "substantial reform". Its proposals would serve to create a more consumer-focused profession, it says.
"Competition in legal services is severely hampered by many unnecessary restrictions permeating the legal profession. These restrictions emanate mainly from the regulatory rules and practices of the Law Society, the Bar Council and the Honourable Society of King's Inns but also from the relevant legislation," the report states.
It advocates the setting up of an independent statutory body called the Legal Services Commission. This would have overall responsibility for regulating the legal profession. The head of the body and a majority of its members should not be practising members of the legal profession.
The commission would be given "explicit authority" to make new regulations but would delegate many regulatory functions to existing and possibly new self-regulatory bodies, while retaining the power to veto the rules of such bodies. The authority also wished to see an end to the "monopoly" on conveyancing through the creation of professional "conveyancers," who would be subject to registration with a conveyancers' council of Ireland.