New president lays ground to make IBA the global voice of the legal profession

LEADERSHIP: Bar presidents to meet as IBA makes plans for a radical overhaul of its structure

The International Bar Association (IBA) is to bring together international leaders from around the world and radically overhaul its structure in an effort to make it the global voice of lawyers.

New president Dianne Kempe, an English-born Bermudan lawyer, has organised a meeting in December of leaders of cross-border groups such as the Union International des Avocats, the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, LawAsia and the Inter-Pacific Bar Association.

It will be the first meeting of its kind.

Ms Kempe said the aim was to avoid overlapping activities and messages from the different groups, especially when it came to addressing the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in its investigation of barriers to legal practice around the world.

'I want to achieve the basis on which to consensus-build the profession's role in talking to the WTO so that, within certain parameters, we're all saying the same thing,' she told the Gazette at the IBA's biennial conference in Amsterdam last week.

'I hope this will be seen as the IBA taking a leadership role; otherwise we could be in danger of giving a fractured message.'

A draft paper on restructuring the IBA went to its management committee in the week before the conference.

It would see the IBA's three constituent sections - business law, legal practice, and energy and natural resources law - abolished.

In their place would be a professional section, which all IBA members would automatically join, dealing with issues such as the WTO, legal education and multi-disciplinary partnerships.

The hope is that this will provide a more unified IBA voice.

The existing committees that make up the three sections would come together within an overall practice section.

Members would have to pay extra to join a particular committee.

The management committee would also be beefed up to allow it to act more as a 'cabinet' so the IBA can respond quicker to events.

The business law section dominates the IBA, producing most of its income, and the plans would not even have reached this early stage without the section's support.

Outgoing IBA president Klaus Bohlhoff said the draft proposals offered 'a very good approach', albeit it one that needed refining.

However, Ms Kempe said 'you don't beat up on an area just because it doesn't make money'.

She said 'there is something in having an identity' for the smaller legal practice section in particular.

Neil Rose