REFORM OF the provision of legal services in Ireland is long overdue, and has been sought by various international and national bodies for more than a decade, including the OECD in 2001 and the Competition Authority in 2006. Last year, reform of legal services, along the lines recommended by the Competition Authority, was one of the conditions of the EU-IMF bailout and it is only now that significant reform has been placed on the political agenda.
The Legal Services Regulation Bill, published earlier this week by the Minister for Justice, proposes the establishment of a legal services regulatory authority, appointed by the Government; measures to make legal costs more transparent; an independent complaints and disciplinary procedure and a legal costs adjudicator to deal with disputes. The Bill also contains proposals which will lead to blurring the distinction between solicitors and barristers and could lead to a merging of the two professions; it opens the way to bringing together lawyers and non-lawyers into multidisciplinary practices and outlines plans to open up legal professional education to third-level institutions, ending the monopoly exercised by the Law Society and the King’s Inns.
Many of its proposals will be welcomed by the public, in particular those that bring transparency to legal costs and make it easier to challenge them, an independent, more user-friendly complaints procedure and more choice in legal education. Many will also welcome the proposal to bring the regulation of legal services out of the hands of the professions.
However, there are justified misgivings about the model chosen by the Minister, which gives the Government the power to appoint the new regulatory authority, which will then report to the Minister for Justice. This authority will have wide powers, including the drawing up and approval of rules of professional conduct. This is not the model recommended by the Competition Authority nor one followed in other jurisdictions, where normally a buffer exists between the Executive and the legal profession, often in the form of oversight by the judiciary, to guarantee the independence of the regulatory machinery.
The independence of the legal profession from the executive arm of government, which is linked to the independence of the judiciary and the rest of the justice system, is viewed throughout the world as fundamental to democracy. Given that the State is often a party to disputes in the courts and features in about 50 per cent of all litigation in Ireland, it is vital that no perception exists that the form of regulation in Ireland may hinder the freedom of lawyers to vigorously oppose the State to defend the interests of their clients.
There needs to be extensive public debate on all these proposals, involving the public and the legal profession as well as politicians, and it should feed into the debate on the proposals when they come before the Oireachtas, so that necessary and considered amendments can be brought forward.