The Gazette 1967/71

more accountancy figures were needed, then they would envisage giving solicitors perhaps twelve months advance notice. A sample of firms might be asked to provide certain details, e.g. about changes in SET, when they produce their next set of annual accounts. The Board think it would be relatively easy at that stage for solicitors to have the information extracted in the normal course of making up the accounts. This would apply equally to an analysis of revenue under the different head ings if this should be needed. The Board add that a standing reference would not necessitate the pro vision of information retrospectively and in a form in which it was not readily available; the advan tage of a standing reference in their view is that it would provide the information required for the next review of solicitors' remuneration to be planned well in advance. Among other long term suggestions made by the Board are that solicitors should be free to enter into partnership with accountants and foreign law yers; and that unless the Monopolies Commission treat the matter as being within their own terms of reference there should be an independent en quiry into the relationship between solicitors and barristers (presumably including fusion). These suggestions have in fact, been the subject of a good deal of consideration by the Council in the past, but they have both so far been rejected as being against the public interest. The former sug gestion is once more under consideration by the Special Committee of the Council on the future of the profession and it is not without interest that this same question is also under consideration in other countries; for example, it was one of the matters discussed at the conference of the Union Internationale des Avocats in Vienna in October 1967. As to the latter suggestion, fusion of the two branches of the profession has become more-or- less a hardy annual; it was debated at some length at the First Commonwealth and Empire Law Con ference held in London in July 1955 and it then appeared that whatever the other merits fusion might have, it had not been demonstrated that it would result in the provision to the public of a cheaper legal service. It seems strange that the Board have refused to accept the principle (which has for generations been accepted in the legal profession and which was also accepted throughout the medical profes sion prior to the introduction of the State National Health Service) that those who can least afford to pay should in effect be subsidised by the fact that members of the profession in general make greater charges to more affluent clients or patients. Cer­

tainly so far as conveyancing costs are concerned, the Board's recommendations would, if implemen ted as they stand, produce the strangely anti-social result that purchasers of the more expensive houses would pay less than at present while purchasers of the cheaper houses up to £2,000 would pay more. Criticisms of the Report which are Under Consideration by the Council Before referring to any specific points in the Board's report which are open to criticism, it should be mentioned that amongst the recommen dations in the report which will undoubtedly have the wholehearted approval of the Council are (a) that Section 89 (c) of the County Courts Act, 1959, should be abolished, thus enabling one solicitor to engage another as his agent in the county court. (This is a change in the law for which the Council have long been pressing, and it was even recommended by the Austin Jones Com mittee on county court procedure—though it has so far been blocked by the opposition of the Bar); and (b) that Section 73 (b) of the Solicitors Act, 1957, should be repealed. That sub-section pre vents a solicitor receiving from his own client on taxation of a county court bill of costs any more than would have been allowed on a party and party taxation. The present provision is referred to by the Board in paragraph sixty-four of their report as "yet another example of the way in which the present system discourages solicitors from court work and at the same time of the need for a closer relationship between charges and expense". The general tenor of the report is that the Board think that in 1966 the incomes of solicitors were, by and large, "just about right", and that increases in charges for any class of work should accordingly be counter-balanced by decreases in charges for other classes. The Board have appar ently based this conclusion on two premises, nam ely (a) that there is, they say, an adequate supply of new entrants to the profession, i.e. of articled clerks who are training to become solicitors and (b) that between 1956 (when the Pilkington Re port on Doctors and Dentists Remuneration was published) and 1966 the increases in incomes of solicitors "approximate to those of all wage earners and salary earners. They are lower than those of doctors and higher than those of dentists and architects" (see paragraph seventeen of the report). But what is the evidence in support of these two premises ? It is true that the shortage of solicitors is consid erably less now than it was in 1965, but even so, 18