The Gazette 1993

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GAZETTE

JUNE 1993

President briefs half-yearly meeting of the Society on current issues

meeting, the President of the Society also criticised the fact that, every year, further layers of bureaucracy, regulation, procedures and tax collection duties were imposed upon solicitors, while the institutions solicitors had to work with were being denied the necessary resources to allow them progress and develop as they should in line with modem needs, Resources needed to be poured into the civil legal aid system and into the proper funding and organisation of the justice system, he said, and he suggested that the judicial commission proposed in the Partnership Programme for Government should be a wide-ranging and broadly based committee comprising not only judges but also barristers and solicitors, as well as registrars, court clerks and concerned outsiders. He was also very critical of the new probate tax proposed in the Finance Bill, 1993 saying the tax was unfair, indiscriminate and would cause huge legal difficulties for the public while yielding very little financial advantage to the Government. He read to the meeting a press statement issued by the Society that day criticising the proposals by the Minister for Commerce & Technology, Seamus Brennan TD, to place a cap on the level of personal injuries awards. He said the Minister's approach was too narrow; it was wrong to seize solely upon the compensation element in the total costs of the insurance industry and to argue that it alone should be reduced. A much broader examination was required. There were dangers inherent in selectively adopting legal provisions or rules from other jurisdictions without looking more generally at other aspects of the legal system in those countries and especially at the employment and social welfare codes that apply to people who suffer injuries. He said the Law Society and the legal profession would be seriously concerned about any move that would interfere with the basic

At the Annual Conference of the Law Society were l-r: Andrew Smyth, Council Member and Chairman of the Solicitors' Benevolent Association, Philip Joyce, Council Member, and Laurence Cullen, Past President of the Society. In his address to the half yearly meeting of the Society held on Thursday, 20 that the opportunity presented to the Society to the lobby further on the Bill had been fully optimised.

May, 1993 in Furbo, Connemara, at the commencement of the Law Society's Annual Conference, the President of the Society, Raymond Monahan, dealt with a wide range of issues of current concern to the profession. The President of the Society said the work of the Society had expanded to the point where there was now in excess of 30 committees. The Council and its committees were broad ranging and were reasonably representative of the profession as a whole in terms of age profile, geographical location, firm size and the type of work carried on by them.While a great effort was made to communicate with the profession, there was a perception amongst ordinary members that the Law Society did not represent them in terms of their views or their interests, therefore, he intended to make greater efforts to promote the message that the Council and the Society are available at all times to be of service and assistance to individual members of the profession. The President of the Society updated members on the progress on the Solicitors (Amendment) Bill and said

He expressed concern about the continuing increase in the numbers who wished to enter the profession and the Í fact that the Law School's resources could not continue to deal with such a | huge throughput. It was for these reasons that he had initiated a special review of admissions and education policy and he was now examining the report of the review committee. Solicitors remuneration was also an area of concern, he said, and a recent survey of the profession conducted by the Costs Committee indicated that many solicitors were not charging sufficient fees to pay their overheads and provide themselves with a basic standard of living. "We have now reached the stage where, if the public wishes to have an accessible and conveniently based profession, it will have to become more conscious of the cost of time and overheads so as to enable the traditional ethos of the profession serving everyone to continue," he said.

In his address to the half yearly

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