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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.
INFORMATION SERVICE
There has been for some
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-