Clementi-style reforms of France’s legal landscape are to go ahead next year despite a retreat on a major element, the reforms’ architect said this week.

Jean-Michel Darrois, a company law specialist and head of Paris firm Darrois Villey Maillot Brochier, headed a commission of academics, business people and other non-lawyers which last month published a review of France’s legal profession.

The review was called by president Nicolas Sarkozy, who said French lawyers needed greater freedom to develop their practices ‘in the face of Anglo-Saxon firms’.

The Darrois Commission’s report makes more than 60 proposals, including joint training and fee sharing for all arms of the profession, the creation of multi-disciplinary practices, and suggests ways to control the cost of legal aid. Accepting the report, Sarkozy said its proposals will be ‘implemented next year’.

Darrois told the council of bars and law societies of Europe (CCBE) in Copenhagen last weekend that the commission had dropped controversial plans to merge the roles of notaries and lawyers. In France, notaries share some of the powers of the state and are empowered to ‘authenticate’ documents and enforce them without going to court. Lawyers, on the other hand, guard their independence and cannot accept devolved state powers.

Darrois said that while there was ‘intellectual satisfaction in revolution’, a merger of notaries and lawyers would compromise independence and give no benefit to clients.

The two branches of the profession could ‘improve service by working hand-in-hand’ with one another, he added.