Europe: commission driving national governments' reform processes across continent


The legal profession in Europe needs to adopt a more co-ordinated approach to the challenges it faces - particularly on the competition front - or individual countries will be 'picked off', the new president of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) warned this week.



Colin Tyre QC, an advocate and part-time law commissioner in Scotland, said: 'When bar associations within the EU and beyond talk to each other, [they] find they are facing the same issues. It is a question of looking for common ground so that we do not find ourselves being picked off by the competition authorities.'



The CCBE, which represents some 700,000 lawyers, is to hold a meeting of European bar leaders later this month in Vienna with a view to developing a more united front.



Mr Tyre, who took over from Portuguese lawyer Manuel Cavaleiro Brandão at the start of the year, acknowledged that the Clementi reforms had at one stage threatened to drive a wedge between the profession in England and Wales and the rest of Europe. However, recent developments in countries such as the Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark and Poland showed that the move towards reform of legal services markets is gathering momentum across the continent.



'All of this is being driven by the European Commission,' he said. 'They are not interested in producing legislation, so they encourage national governments to do so.'



Mr Tyre, a member of the UK's CCBE delegation since 1999, said the legal profession is hampered by the absence of a body within the EU institutions that could fight its corner and point out that there are wider issues at stake, such as the quality of justice. 'The problem at the moment is that the commission and competition authorities are not receptive to the idea that there's anything else to look at here apart from... economic theory.'



The CCBE president told the Gazette that bars and law societies faced by competition reforms needed to emphasise public interest benefits, to avoid the charge of being protectionist. The defence of core values such as lawyers' independence is vital, he added.



Away from competition battles, Mr Tyre highlighted the CCBE's work on education and training as a key initiative for 2007. 'Now that you have a situation where lawyers qualified in one state can go off and establish themselves where they want, there's a great common interest in producing a minimum competence and quality,' he said.



The CCBE is therefore aiming to reach an agreed position on common outcomes, specifying what should be expected of a lawyer when they set up a practice. 'If we could achieve something along these lines, we would achieve something of major service to the users of legal services across Europe,' Mr Tyre said.



He added that the CCBE would continue its dialogue with the inter-governmental Financial Action Task Force on the effect of money laundering regulations on the legal profession.



'We want to make the point that concepts such as client confidentiality are not negotiable,' Mr Tyre said. 'We are still trying to persuade [the task force] that they have gone too far in relation to lawyers.'



The CCBE is also looking at establishing a foundation to help develop the rule of law and the legal profession in eastern Europe, in part to meet the challenge of the American Bar Association's long-standing work in the region, seen by some as American legal imperialism. Mr Tyre said a legal entity such as a foundation could persuade the European Commission to use the CCBE as a source of expertise and a vehicle through which to provide funds.



Philip Hoult