Protecting the core values

Will the liberalisation of legal services dilute the credibility of solicitors? Andrew Holroyd says reform does not mean abandoning values

In a recent article, the presidents of the law societies of Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland argued that the abolition of the rule preventing employed solicitors providing services to the general public would lead to a devalued solicitor brand (see [2002] Gazette, 4 July, 21).

I fundamentally disagree with this.

The brand of solicitor is ours and its value must be protected.

The Law Society proposals do not imply a sale of that brand.

But liberalisation is essential if we are to maintain and enhance the role of solicitors in a changing legal marketplace.

With strong regulation, the Society will maintain the brand and our core values will not be threatened.

Without these changes, we will see much of the legal services market slip from the hands of solicitors to an unregulated market, which would not be in the public interest.

Our core values equate to being highly trained, regulated professionals with independence, confidentiality and integrity, providing expert legal services to our clients.

We constantly balance our duties to our clients, our employers and partners with our obligations to society and as officers of the court.

Contrary to our commercial interests, we regularly turn away clients to comply with professional standards.

The recent corporate governance scandals involving Enron and Worldcom have shown that professionals have nothing to sell but their professionalism.

Companies such as the RAC are unlikely to risk compromising their operations by asking their solicitors to act unprofessionally.

Neither will the RAC's solicitors compromise their professional status.

To suggest otherwise is to me a slur on employed solicitors, who already make up 21% of the practising certificate-holding profession.

Will independence be compromised? It could be argued that non-solicitor owners will not understand the professional obligations or share the ethos of their solicitor employees.

If so, such owners will have severe commercial problems, as their product will lose its value.

But solicitors might sometimes be under pressure to act in ways that compromise integrity or independence to clients.

A solicitor employee will have to chose between professional values and employment prospects.

Just as with solicitor owners, if they damage the brand, they will be dealt with by the Law Society.

In addition, the Society must be able to prevent undesirables owning a solicitors' practice, to intervene in non-solicitor owned practices while ensuring that clients have other equal safeguards (for example, the compensation fund).

If these safeguards are in place, the public has much to gain from a more accessible, more varied and better marketed provision of legal services.

The other option of non-solicitor provision of legal services is neither in the public interest nor in the interest of the profession.

Such services will multiply further if we do not seize the initiative now.

The change will bring increased competition for private practice and that is why I would like to see the swift abolition of the introduction and referral code (subject to disclosure to the client) and the ability for firms to share a portion of their fees with a third party.

This will allow law firms to make commercial arrangements with third parties prior to non-solicitor owners' entry into the market while retaining ownership of their practices.

Nevertheless, the changes will likely bring about a rearrangement of the legal services market.

Some solicitors will shift to the employed sector, but many would welcome the liberation from having to run their own business to letting someone else watch the bottomline.

Whatever happens, the core values of our profession must be defended.

But this depends on effective regulation whoever owns the organisation delivering the service.

Andrew Holroyd is a Law Society Council member and chairman of the Society's standards board