The Gazette 1967/71

such transactions is bound to be the estate devel oper and there should be no financial inducement to the purchaser to refrain from being separately represented. Furthermore, neither the work nor the responsibility are substantially decreased where a solicitor acts for both parties. If the only alter native to this reduction in charges is to stop solicitors acting for both parties in a conveyancing transaction (and if it is to be stopped for sales and purchases, there would seem to be at least as much reason for stopping it on the grant of leases), the Council will seriously have to think in the public interest of either acquiescing in legislation to produce this result or making a Solicitors' Prac tice Rule to this effect. In paragraph thirty-eight of their report the Board appear to criticise the Law Society for the way in which the Society obtained an estimate in 1965 of the shortage of solicitors. The Board say : "We think it likely that this estimate was based on a traditional conception of a solicitor's practice. Therefore, we do not consider it should play any part in our consideration of the level of statutorily determined charges." The Board also state : "Nor do we consider that such estimates should in the future be made by the profession without assis tance. They should clearly be made in concert with independent advisers and with due regard to the Ministry of Labour's estimate of manpower resources." It is difficult to see the justification for this criticism. The estimate that in 1965 there was a shortage of 5,000 solicitors was based on a statis tical report made at the time to the Law Society by an independent consulting actuary and statis tician. Furthermore, the object of the enquiry was to find out on. the express assumption that the professional business of solicitors remained at its then level, how much leeway had to be made up before the profession was fully manned; to work on any other assumption could well have been criticised as visionary and unrealistic. The figures shown in Table 13 of the statistical supplement to the PIB report have, so far as they relate to the average amount per bill of solicitors acting for lessors and lessees, produced a strange result. Lessors' solicitors' charges are at present double those of lessees' solicitors, but so far from this proportion being reflected in Table 13, it appears that the average bill of a lessor's solicitor, taking the country as a whole, was £20 in 1966, whereas the average bill of a solicitor acting for a lessee was £18, which no-where nearly reflects the proper proportion of lessors' to lessees' solicitors' charges. Indeed, taking the Central and South east area by itself the figures given in Table 13 20

to undertake conveyancing at less than the proper rates and who thus would in all probability be economically unable to afford to give the client more than a cut-price service. Late Press Continued The Board have clearly shown that they are op posed to local minimum conveyancing scales : but they do not appear to have considered Rule 2 of the Solicitors Practice Rules 1936, as no mention is made of it. This rule against undercutting (which makes it a professional offence for a solici tor to obtain business by holding himself out as being prepared to undertake work at less than the standard charge) was made by the Council, with the consent of the Master of the Rolls, after the Master of the Rolls had been convinced that the making of the rule would be in the public interest in order to prevent cut-throat competition between solicitors which, in the depression of the early 1930s, had led to solicitors getting into financial difficulties. It is to be hoped that the Prices and Incomes Board's report will not be treated as a reason for repealing Rule 2 of the Solicitors Prac tice Rules, especially as it looks as if the Board did not even take it into account when deciding to recommend that solicitors should have absolute freedom to reduce their charges below the proper scale. The suggestion in paragraph eighty-four of the report to the effect that for work not governed by- scale charges, solicitors should make a charge "re lated to the time spent on the job" is not forward looking—it is indeed retrograde. All solicitors' charges used to be based solely on the time element, but in 1882 this method of charging was, for very good reasons, abandoned, in respect of convey ancing, in favour of scale charges. Furthermore, in 1953, the time element was abandoned as the sole factor to be taken into account in all other non- contentious work; it was recognised by the Statu tory Committee set up to regulate conveyancing costs, of which the Lord Chancellor is Chairman, that as, for example, is the situation in the United States, many other factors besides time should also be considered, such as the amount of money in volved, the complexity of the matter and the im portance of the matter to the client. The suggestion that a solicitor should only be entitled to charge scale and a half when acting for both vendor and purchaser would, on building estates, be an inducement to the purchaser always to employ the vendor's solicitor. This would not be in the public interest as the principal client in