The Gazette 1967/71

confidence of his clients. Besides his function in the1 courts the solicitor provides a host of other services for his clients which are, if less in the public eye, almost equally important. He carries on negotiations for them with various public officials and departments and helps them with advice and assistance in a wide variety of matters ranging from the- humble matter of social welfare benefit to tax planning and business reconstruction. The activity of the central and local government is so per vasive and so intimately interwoven with the everyday life of even the humblest person and these matters are so complex that it is absolutely essential that he has competent advice easily and quickly available. This is the service which the solicitor has to supply and his function in the machinery of the democratic process. For many of these services he is far from adequately remunerated indeed in some cases he received no reward at all. I take this opportunity to reject utterly that allegation that solicitors rarely, if ever, give their ser vices for nothing. It is not only untrue but manifestly untrue. In this country we have as yet no civil legal aid, but yet it is the proud boast of the profession that no litigant with an action to take or defend in which he had a case to make was denied the services of a solicitor solely because he had no money to pay him. Civil legal aid in England costs something in the order of five million a year to the state to give the same service that is carried by the profession in this country. Not merely that the solicitor gives his own personal time and energy but he also provides the office machinery to give prac tical effect to these services for which, of course, he has to pay as well as paying for court fees, stamps, witnesses and so on, so that where a solicitor gives his sendees without remuneration he is in addition putting his hand into his own pocket and is at a financial loss. The service given by a solicitor to the public particularly in rural areas is one which cannot be replaced by any known substitutes and anything which endangers the existence of that service without providing any adequate alternative is clearly inamicable to the public interest. In recent years rising costs and falling population in many areas and increasing complexity of legislation is making it progressively more difficult for the solicitor in some areas at any rate to continue to carry on. In many cases it is extremely difficult to find staff at any price. This is particularly true of one-man practices of which there is a large number of the country; the obvious remedy is to amalgamate into larger multiple partner firms. This will probably be the trend of the future but it will be slow in accomplishment and bring its disad vantages. First of all the solicitor will become more remote both geographically and psychologically from his client. In the present arrangement the client sees the one solicitor for all his business but in a multiple partner firm he will see one partner for one thing and another partner for another and the result would be a loss of that personal relationship which is such a valuable feature of a small firm. It has also been alleged that solicitors are in many cases wanting in competence. I have taken the opportunity during the past few months of visiting solicitors in all parts of Ireland and I am impressed at the high degree of expertise that is dis played by solicitors all over Ireland, many of them working in some of the most difficult conditions. Consideration of these matters has naturally led your Council to re-examine its function. Heretofore the role of the Council has been protective in two senses: it has the duty of protecting the interests of its members on the one hand and the duty of protecting the interests of the public by ensuring a proper standard of education, com- 4

petence and ethics in the members of the profession. In the future this Council will have to become promotional. Again this will have two aspects, the active promotion of the interest of its members and the active promotion of the interest of the public. This thinking has led to some of the proposals which follow. CONSULTATIVE SERVICE It has been suggested to the Council that in view of the increasing need lor specialisation, that some sort ol consultative arrangement between solicitors might be sponsored by the Society. It is quite impossible for a solicitor in general practice to be a complete expert in all aspects of his professional activity, consequently he usually confines his expertise to those fields in which it is most frequently demanded of him. Fields in which he is unlikely to be consulted he leaves out of his reckoning altogether, e.g. it would be rather pointless for a solicitor in Tipperary to make a close study of admiralty law and practice. If by some freak he did find himself presented with such a problem it would be an ideal arrangement if he could refer to some firm who held itself out to specialise in this particular field and allow that firm to take over all or part of the work for him on some kind of a profit sharing basis. This scheme has obvious advan tages, it encourages a higher degree of specialisation in the firms offering the sendee and it should provide an excellent service for the solicitor not specialising in that particular field. There are obvious difficulties in the way of this type of arrangement but they should not be insuperable. The matter in any case is being closely investigated by the Council and it is hoped that something construc tive will result. time past a considerable volume of opinion that the Society should use some kind of a public relations service and let it be said straight away that there was and is a good deal of difference of opinion as to the advisability of such a service. Most of the arguments for and against when examined closely turn out to be based on an infinite variety of conceptions of what the service is going to be. I prefer, therefore, if the term "Public Relations" were dropped altogether and some alternative term such as "Information Service" used instead. The Council has before them a report of a committee which was appointed quire recently to study this problem and the members of that committee are to be complimented on the speed and thoroughness with which they carried out their work. Briefly what is pro posed is that a completely new branch of the secretariat should be formed. It will provide an information service for the profession. It will collect and digest all publica tions and happenings in the legal and legislative world and in the commercial world of interest to the profession and will communicate this digested information to the individual members of the profession by means of a journal incorporating the Gazette issued at the maximum possible frequency, weekly if possible, certainly not less frequently than monthly. It would also be available for enquiries. It should also be able to carry on a modest amount of legal research upon which proposals for law reform can be based. On the other hand it will keep the public informed so far as possible of various ways in which they and their interests are effected by changes in law and the services which are available to them in our profession and the desireability of using these services. In this aspect of activity of the information service it may be necessary to employ outside agencies on a part- INFORMATION SERVICE There has been for some