Letter to Ajai Chopra about the Legal Services Regulation Bill 2011

Dear Ajai,
I am writing to you again about structural reforms in Ireland's program (see my previous letter about the electricity market). This time, I am writing to you about reform of the legal profession. As part of the program, Ireland has to liberalise the system of training and accrediting legal practitioners in Ireland. In fulfilment of this obligation, the Government has published the Legal Services Regulation Bill 2011.

While there is much in this Bill which is worthwhile, unfortunately on the issue of liberalising the training and accreditation of legal practitioners I believe it comes up short. Both the Memo to the Bill and the Govt press releases alongside it suggest that it is opening up the way for competition between training centres. However, apart from requiring a report to be drawn up on legal training, the actual Bill merely says that the new Legal Services Authority is to keep the provision of training places under "review" (section 9).

This use of the word "review" is quite peculiar. I cannot recall seeing it used in this manner in Irish law before. It appears that far from the new Authority having the power to authorise and regulate the training of lawyers by new and existing institutions, its role will be a more passive one of simply monitoring this process as carried out by the existing training institutions.

This seems to contradict Ireland's commitment under the program. It seems that apart from monitoring the existing institutions, the only proactive thing the new authority will do is publish a report on regulating training -which may or may not be acted upon by later governments.

I believe, this is a mistake, and that instead of waiting for a report to be drawn up and further legislation to be published later (if ever), we should state right now, in this initial piece of legislation, that the authorisation of institutions to train accredited lawyers is to be liberalised and performed by the new authority. We must state this up front, now, to get the ball rolling on this. We have had previous reports on this topic, I see no reason to delay reform while another one is prepared.