297 / 736
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