Training: fears over regional discrepancies in the cost of electronic identification cards

Legal professionals must learn much more about technology and look to adopt digital signatures and encryption by 2010, according to the outgoing president of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE).


At the CCBE's e-communication conference in Madrid last month, Bernard Vatier called upon national bars to get involved in new technologies to control their use, to adopt digital identification systems and to train for the future before it is too late.


He said: 'The national bars have a very important responsibility. They have to implement the new technologies and protect the independence of the lawyer, and make the technology respect that.'


Mr Vatier added: 'It's the local bars that need to safe-keep confidence.'


The head of the European lawyers' group emphasised the need for authentication when using the Internet to conduct legal business, something every speaker in Madrid agreed would be the defining shape of law by 2010. The consensus among the speakers at the conference was that digital signatures would be the main solution to this problem.


Mr Vatier said there is a vital need 'to train lawyers in the use of these new technologies', and pointed to equality in representation as a key reason why this will be needed.


He said that equality 'is not always upheld as we would expect', and that this is partly due to the difference in IT spend seen between 'lawyers for individuals and lawyers for companies'. He warned: 'We need to prevent a fracturing between these.'


Paul Timmers, head of the eGovernment unit at the European Commission, said the EU was now conducting studies as to whether there was a need for legislation on what is known as 'eID', or electronic identification.


One senior delegate later told the Gazette that legislation might be necessary, partly because countries such as the UK seem to have set high prices for eID cards. Wolfgang Heufler, a member of the CCBE IT law committee and of the Austrian Bar Association, mentioned that upgrading to smartcards might cost Austrians as little as 4 euro. The Home Office in the UK currently intends to charge around £30 per ID card when they are introduced, and has yet to decide whether digital signatures will even be on the cards.


When asked last week whether eID systems and digital signatures need to be examined by those who will be using them, Mr Timmers sided with Mr Vatier on the need for national bodies such as the local bar to look at the technology.


He said: 'They should be looking at potential solutions - these are not the kinds of areas for having a top-down [EU] approach. Work has to happen on this right now.'


But Mr Timmers was positive about how certain areas were progressing: 'A lot of work is happening right now.'



Link: www.ccbe.org