Justice under pressure

The Bar got record numbers of delegates for its annual conference. Over 400 paid to attend this year’s event which had the theme of access to justice. The Bar’s success is somewhat in contrast to the Law Society. It has quietly buried its annual conference in the face of member apathy.

Those attending the Bar conference got the usual balance of general keynote speakers and more specialist sessions. Desmond Browne QC gave the usual bullish presentation as the current chairman of the Bar. A particular target was the Legal Services Board which was reminded that it should be a secondary regulator, intervening only if the primary regulators were defective.

This reflects growing anxiety at the Bar of a forced deregulation of existing restrictions on practice, such as the prohibition on partnership. Neither branch of the legal profession fought the legislation that established the Legal Services Board on the principled ground of preservation of self-regulation.

The Law Society capitulated without a fight and the Bar folded pretty soon afterwards. Both may now regret decisions that they thought were tactically clever at the time but which sold the pass on an important principle.

Legal aid was a predictably dark theme through the conference from Desmond Browne’s opener to Dominic Grieve’s closer. The Conservative shadow minister of justice made it clear that getting any more money out of the Treasury at the current time was a ‘fantasy’.

He had only the usual range of suspects to offer as alternative sources of income: a contingency legal aid fund, interest on solicitors’ clients accounts and legal expenses insurance. The future seems pretty bleak since nothing has come of these ideas in the last three decades in which they have been periodically trotted out as possible alternatives to state funding.

European Pro Bono Forum

A good attendance was also recorded for the third European Pro Bono Forum held in Budapest.

Pro bono is very much an American concept that has taken deep root in the United Kingdom. The conference was part of an effort to embed its principles within Europe. However, despite a reasonably balanced attendance, the 17 firms that supported the event were all either based in the UK or the US. Opening remarks were made by our very own Lord Phillips of Sudbury, onetime senior partner at Bates, Wells and Braithwaite, founder and, for many years, chair of the Solicitors Pro Bono Group—now known as LawWorks.

Most of the contributors came from legal firms but one of the most interesting was UK-based charity consultant, David Carrington. He talked about the charity sector more generally. In the UK, the non-government sector employs a staggering 6.5 per cent of the workforce, 1.4 million people. There has been an 11 per cent fall in personal donations since the recession kicked in.

However, the impact of this has been somewhat mitigated by the fact that most of the major trusts have maintained giving at last year’s levels despite stock market and interest rate falls. Television appeals have taken more money than in previous years. The effect of the recession on the commitment of large commercial firms to pro bono is to be seen.

And over to Canada

Difficulties beset legal aid in many jurisdictions. The Canadian province of Ontario is no exception. Its problems are depressingly similar to ours: legal aid practitioners under pressure; strikes and the threat of strikes by practitioners; a government seeking to squeeze resources; pressure on discretionary elements of the budget.

For the last few months, criminal practitioners have carried out a surprisingly effective withdrawal of labour. Beginning in Toronto, but now spreading out across the province, senior practitioners have been refusing to take murder cases or those involving ‘gangs and guns’.

They want a raise in pay. Unlike here, everyone agrees that defence lawyers get paid much less than their prosecution colleagues. As a result, there is considerable support for the striking lawyers from judges and prosecutors.

Even the government is sympathetic to an extent. The attorney general, the minister responsible for legal aid, has managed to find $150m extra over four years.

He has, however, been rather canny about how this is to be spent and set up five working parties on different elements of the scheme to get them thinking about how they might spend the extra money.

This puts the criminal practitioners in a rather difficult position in asking for all the extra money for themselves though they claim that the whole lot would not be enough.

For the time being, the various provider interests are holding together but pressures are growing. Mental health practitioners have now decided that they should hold a similar strike to the criminal lawyers.
Ontario’s 70 law centres, known as community legal clinics and the best funded such network in the world, feel particularly vulnerable.

They receive about 20 per cent of Ontario’s legal aid expenditure, roughly double that spent on social welfare law by our Legal Services Commission.

Their riposte has been to organise a conference with the participation of past attorney generals of both major parties, the current incumbent and past premier, David Peterson as a show of strength.

The result is to be seen but the conference provided a good indication of the value of law centres embedded in local communities. Legal aid administrators may be suspicious and eye them up for cuts but politicians are acutely aware of their potential political clout. T

hus, Ontario’s clinic network appears to have a wider group of friends in its legislature then do legal aid practitioners in social welfare law in ours.

Roger Smith is director of JUSTICE

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