The struggle over the financial limits for small claims is an issue which is traditionally difficult for lawyer policymakers, because of the apparent conflict between public and private interests. The raising of personal injury claim levels in the UK has caused a fuss, and now the topic has appeared on the EU justice agenda.

I can think of two different policy areas in the past where the apparent conflict also occurred. When law centres began to be established in the 1970s, there was an argument as to whether the Law Society should waive the conditions on practising certificates to allow free advice to be given to anyone off the street by someone with the status of a lawyer employed by a third-party organisation. Privately, many feared that free advice would erode the market of high street solicitors – until it was discovered that many law firms established themselves around law centres, and were making money from their referrals. The arguments disappeared.

Similarly, many countries still ban foreign lawyers from entering their jurisdictions because their lawyers fear that the big Anglo-Saxon firms will erode their market share. This is despite the fact that markets which have opened – for instance, Hong Kong or Brussels, never mind London – have found that local firms benefited from the influx of foreign lawyers, and picked up clients and expertise.

Now the European Commission is carrying out a consultation on the European small-claims procedure, and one of the issues is whether the current qualifying limit of €2,000 should be raised. In the one corner, there is the pro-lawyer argument, which can look to unsympathetic outsiders like corporatism (‘consumers need legal advice if they are to be successful in a claim’) and, in the other, the representatives of consumerism (‘claiming your rights should be cheap and easy’) - although to unsympathetic outsiders that can also look like cutting costs without concerns for justice.

When lawyers put arguments against raising the limit on small claims – the European consultation raises the possibility of an extension to €10,000 – it immediately looks as if we are trying to protect our market share, particularly in times of economic crisis. But it seems to me that the question of market share is irrelevant, since the outcome can go either way. That is why I have given the past scenarios above about the result for market share in different legal circumstances. Of course it might mean that citizens will not use lawyers for larger claims. But at present the European small-claims procedure is hardly used at all. The counter-argument is that, if the limit is substantially raised, more citizens might use it, and may well turn to lawyers for help in cross-border cases. Similarly, the consumerist argument about access to justice, and its counter about cutting costs without concern for justice, slug themselves to a standstill, at least until the test is tried.

That is why I prefer the purely public interest argument that citizens should benefit from legal advice before making a claim. It is true, and borne out by experience. I know of two liberal countries where the courts have led campaigns to bring lawyers back into litigation, on the grounds that it is more efficient in terms of time and money, and leads to a better administration of justice. (I stress that my organisation, the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, CCBE, has yet to discuss the question of small claims, and so these are purely personal views.)

So what is the European small-claims procedure? It was established on 1 January 2009 in all member states other than Denmark through Regulation 861/2007. It was introduced for the usual reasons: to simplify and speed up small-scale cross-border litigation, and to reduce costs.

It has the following features: there is a written procedure, but with the possibility to hold a hearing; there are multilingual standard forms; there is no mandatory legal representation; the loser-pays principle is limited to reasonable costs; it encourages the use of IT, for example videoconferences – and the use of technology will grow, since the small-claims procedure is one of those being piloted in the e-CODEX project, linking up member states’ e-justice systems, which will in due course make more electronic legal transactions a reality; it is available for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); and judgments are directly enforceable in other member states.

After almost five years of use, the European Commission is carrying out this assessment, with a view to presenting a report by the end of the year, accompanied, if necessary, by a proposal for revision. The deadline is 10 June 2013. It is not too late to give your views - only don’t mention market share...

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents about one million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs

A part of your tax that funds the EU’s budget goes towards the improvement of human rights and the rule of law in countries around the world. This makes sense to me, because a stable world enables us to enjoy those things which governments are supposed to provide: an environment for improved trade, easier travel and general peace for EU citizens – never mind the improvements for citizens of the country being assisted. Many people criticise everything the EU does, but I am not one. However, in this respect the organisation of their funding leaves much to be desired, as I will show.

I know that there are arguments as to whether aid is beneficial in the first place. Some people think that aid encourages dependency and stifles initiative, that most of it is misdirected, and that middle-class international development professionals benefit most from it. I can think of one organisation abroad which receives justice assistance from various distinguished bodies, but is still unable to organise the proverbial you-know-what in a brewery for its members.

Nevertheless, I write on the basis of optimism - that such aid can help, if only at the most basic level of maintaining a dialogue between countries, or in our case between lawyers, on important matters. And some of the programmes can be practical and useful, such as (to use US-funded projects from the body cited below) setting up legal aid clinics, assisting law schools in introducing new courses and practical training, and helping bars to develop bar exams or codes of legal ethics.

If we can agree with the optimistic premise, there are good examples of how other governments provide rule of law money (since the EU is not alone in investing in justice outside its borders). The American Bar Association – the US body mentioned above - has an impressive organisation, the Rule of Law Initiative, which has received many millions of dollars from the US government (chiefly USAID) over the years.

Its board is made of the great and good, mostly American but including our own Lord Goldsmith of Iraq invasion fame – and significantly it has an advisory body including no fewer than four justices of the US Supreme Court. It has a staff of over 400, and implements legal reform programmes in more than 40 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. In an admirable twist, it has a pool of short- and long-term volunteers who, since the organisation’s launch, have contributed more than $200m in pro bono technical legal assistance.

For those countries which are sensitive to working with the US, the Canadian government provides a helpful alternative: it similarly funds the Canadian Bar Association through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and so offers the same kind of programmes in a number of countries.

The US and Canadian examples involve a structure where the money goes through a single source of obvious expertise, enabling planning and assessment to take place on a sensible, year-by-year basis. The bars have access to the full range of their members, knowledgeable in many areas of law, who can also offer assistance on a pro bono basis.

The EU, unfortunately, employs the opposite approach: a scatter-gun. The funding comes from different directorates – Enlargement, Development and Co-operation, External Action Service, for instance – none of them knowledgeable on justice issues (they operate various programmes with different success rates). Some of the money is provided by headquarters in Brussels, the rest dispensed through local EU delegations in particular countries. This means that, to obtain funding, you have to keep your eye on many places. Among the very wide range of successful applicants, consultancies figure highly, helping to run biscuit factories one day and legal aid clinics the next, regardless of expertise. They are good at putting in applications with the required buzzwords, since they depend on it for their survival, and the Commission knows them from previous applications.

This is not wise. It places the EU behind our competitors in promoting European legal values and legal systems to countries around the world. It puts obstacles in the way of building long-term relationships between relevant legal partners. But it continues because the structure and organisation of the Commission is so fixed that there is no way round this multiplicity of funding sources and applicants.

There are solutions: either there should be a single agency (as in the US or Canada) to which external justice funding is provided; or all funding for external justice projects should go through the Commission directorate responsible for justice at EU level, DG Justice. This answer is so simple, but no one in the Commission seems able to implement it. I beg them to put our tax pounds to better use.

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents about one million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs

There is a tradition which is stronger on the continent than in the UK, that of the Festschrift or Liber Amicorum. ‘Celebratory book’ is probably the closest in English. For the second time, I have been asked to contribute to one, and it is thoughts about the lawyer in whose honour the book is being produced which form the background to what I want to say this week. Since the eventual publication is intended as a surprise, no identity will be disclosed.

The lawyer concerned - I shall call her Catherine - is a francophone and loves the French language above most things. She feels correctly that language does more than communicate surface meaning. It conveys cultural concepts which are embedded in a society, and are often untranslatable.

In the law, there are many such concepts. We could start with our very own title, the word ‘solicitor’. It should never be translated - and in proper texts is not - since nothing in another language can convey its significance. To consider its nearest French equivalents, a solicitor is neither an ‘avocat’ (more or less a barrister in our terms, typically allied to court work and advocacy) nor a ‘notaire’ (which in its purest form is a public officer carrying out delegated acts on behalf of the state).

Catherine is particularly exercised by legal professional privilege, which is called ‘professional secrecy’ in her system. Again the two concepts have apparent surface similarities which conceal deep differences of approach. Legal professional privilege is at root a case-based rule of evidence, which can be waived by the client. ‘Professional secrecy’, on the other hand, is derived from the penal code, whose breach is a criminal offence. ‘Professional secrecy’ is not simply a professional or contractual duty, but a matter of public order, and it cannot be waived by the client. (And don’t let’s start on ‘public order’, which again means different things in the two systems.)

There are many more examples, but the point is that language conveys cultural concepts, as all translators know, and the use of just one language risks errors and misunderstandings not only across legal cultures, but in understanding oneself at home. This latter point is the most important. Catherine argues for the retention of French at international level, not only to help unlock the meaning of civil law systems used in many countries around the world, but also to reflect better on the common law, whose advantages and disadvantages would not be fully known to us otherwise, since it would not have been properly compared to anything else.

This is the heart of the argument. Real understanding, whether of the law and justice or anything else, comes not just - or even not much - from consideration of the concept on its own, but from comparison across as wide a range of other notions as possible. Is the world really understandable in just one language, whose range of concepts is necessarily limited by the cultural imagination which gives rise to its words? If everyone who had ever lived had only ever spoken English, would we be as advanced in our understanding as we are today? Catherine would say ‘no’.

This is the time to undertake an exercise. For a moment, we anglophones should put ourselves in the shoes of a non-English speaker. The world immediately becomes a less accommodating place, since English has invaded so many spaces, and continues to do so. There are a million possible examples from airports, museums, loan-words, shops and street conversations between strangers in foreign cities, in all of which English dominates or is the only second language used after the local native tongue.

This never-ending spread of English has turned the unlikely figure of Catherine into an anti-colonial warrior. She worships the French language and the cultural products it has engendered, for instance its literature and its law. She believes that by speaking French when she can, and so supporting its strength for as long as possible, she is striking a blow against the notion that one language - it happens to be English at the moment - can explain everything in the world. (That is a shocking idea, to think that we cannot understand everything through the use of our native tongue.)

You might ask whether Catherine would be such an anti-colonialist if it were French which were dominant, as it was for so long. Knowing her, and being honest, I think the answer would be ‘no’, since she so believes in its unbeatable beauty. But she has learned the hard way. By having English forced on her, she has come to see that two are better than one on the road to understanding. The pros and cons of her beloved ‘avocat’ or ‘secret professionel’ can best be realised by standing them against similar concepts from a different culture, and so seeing their outlines better. As a result, we anglophones should all wish Catherine well in her one-woman linguistic warfare.

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents about one million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs

The Law Society’s Research Unit is in the process of publishing multi-part assessments of the legal services market. The reports often confirm what we already know – for instance, that there are two solicitors’ professions, and aren’t the City types doing well, while those poor devils in the small and medium-sized firms are struggling somewhat?

I shall focus on a single aspect of the research, relating to the profitability of small and medium firms. We know that City lawyers’ earnings are generally in the stratosphere, but what do the rest earn? This is of particular interest because I have recently seen comparative lawyers’ earnings figures from a number of continental jurisdictions. It is instructive to see how solicitors in small firms fare in relation to their European counterparts.

Of course, comparisons should compare like with like, and that is one of the advantages of the continental study, which uses the same definitions across various countries. It has been undertaken by the bars of six member states - Germany, Belgium (French- and German-speaking lawyers), Spain, France, Italy and Luxembourg. A small working group of their representatives was established in 2010. The data relates to around half a million lawyers, roughly half the total number of European lawyers.

To start with solicitors, sole practitioners (if I understand the tables properly) had ‘mean profits’ of £40,000 in 2009/10 (which signifies the gross figure before deducting notional salaries and notional interest). This rose to around £60,000 per partner in firms with 2-4 partners; £100,000 in firms with 5-10 partners; and £140,000 with firms of 11-25 partners.

Of course, figures for lawyers on the continent are in euros (currently £1 equals around €1.16, although the ratio would have been different for the period in question.) The average annual taxable income in 2009 of lawyers in Belgium (French-speaking), Italy and Spain stood at between €46,000 and €48,000, where ‘average annual taxable income’ means gross fees minus expenses paid to third parties, operating expenses and reimbursements (employees, lawyers, bailiffs, experts, translators). It is interesting to note that the figures for these three countries stood within the same narrow band – and that the figures compare roughly with the figure that solo practitioner solicitors earned in the same period (of course we need to bear in mind that there will be differences of definition).

The UK is not alone in having two professions working side by side. The splits are somewhat different in other countries. So the German figures for 2008 show that the gross annual income of lawyers was €52,000 in western Germany but only €40,000 in the east. And in France, the average income figures are pushed up because of the earnings in Paris, which are 60% higher than elsewhere in the country. So, France’s average income did not sit within the €46,000-€48,000 band, but rather at €74,586.

There are other interesting outcomes. France has the most women lawyers among the six countries surveyed (at 50.9% in 2011), Germany the least (32%). Statistics like these might induce policymakers to consider why there are such wide differences among neighbours. There are 165 bars in Italy (161 in France), but only 28 in Germany – all the six have national bodies, but the local bars retain important regulatory functions. The number of lawyers per 100,000 inhabitants meanwhile was the lowest for France in 2011 (84 – but France has traditionally had a lower number of lawyers than its comparably sized neighbours), while there were 278 per 100,000 for Spain – and 359 for Luxembourg (which is thought to be due to the size of the country, its banking sector and its hosting the headquarters of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg).

I would urge the Law Society to join the group of six, not only to bring its research expertise to the pool, but also to ensure that in future we have comparable figures from a wider swathe of Europe. Then we will really know whether we would be better off as lawyers in France – and, if so, we could ask the Law Society what it intends to do about it.

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents about one million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs