According to one senior barrister, the report will state that members of the public should be able to employ barristers without having to go through a solicitor. Although the Bar Council, which represents barristers, recently relaunched a system that allows some professionals to access barristers directly, in almost all cases potential clients must retain a solicitor before being entitled to employ a barrister.
The report will also be scathing of the regulation of both solicitors and barristers. According to one source close to the Law Society, which represents solicitors, it will call for an end to the system where representative bodies are also responsible for regulating the profession.
The paper on the legal profession is expected to be one of the most hard-hitting reports to emerge from the Competition Authority’s office and will raise the bar for other ongoing investigations, including engineering and doctors.
Last year, when John Fingleton, the chairman of the Competition Authority, criticised what he said were obvious problems in the legal profession, the Law Society reacted by calling for his resignation. The society’s reaction to next week’s report is likely to be similarly en-trenched.
Barristers, on the other hand, have adopted a more conciliatory approach, appearing to accept that some level of change is inevitable.
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It is understood that, despite lobbying by the Bar Council, the Competition Authority report will call for a change to allow barristers employed by companies to perform court work. Fingleton had also suggested that he was opposed to the system of differentiating between junior counsel and senior counsel. However, according to one senior counsel, the report will not go as far as calling for the differentiation to be abolished.
The focus of the report will be the barriers to entry to the profession. It will state that there is no reason why barristers can only be qualified by the Bar Council and solicitors can only be qualified by the Law Society.
The report will also look at the way in which legal fees for court work are set. There were suggestions that the report would recommend that the taxing master, who currently sets legal fees associated with court work, should be made accountable to the Oireachtas. According to one government source, the report will instead call for greater transparency in fees.