Issues raised by barristers’ report will feed into disciplinary regime

Barristers don’t handle client money and they have less direct interaction with the public than solicitors. They are also fewer in number than the other arm of the profession, so it’s no surprise that there are far fewer complaints made against them than against solicitors.

Last year, according to the annual report from the Barristers Professional Conduct Tribunal, 50 new complaints were lodged and a further 15 carried over from the previous year. Oddly, the report does not reveal how many resulted in a finding of misconduct, but it says fines of €50,000 were imposed on unnamed barristers.

In the tribunal’s report, chairman Patrick McCann SC says a “critical component of confidence for the general public” is that the tribunal is independent of the Bar Coun- cil, the governing body for barristers, and that the links between the two bodies are “as minimal as possible consistent with common sense”.

In a similar vein, the disciplinary code of the Bar of Ireland states that the tribunal’s procedures shall be designed “to ensure a fair hearing of the complaint and shall be in accordance with the rules of constitutional and natural justice”.

The tribunal has nine members, four of whom are practising barristers and five of whom are non-lawyers nominated by Ibec, Ictu and the Bar Council (which nominates three of the non-lawyers). Their extensive efforts to ensure independence, fairness and consistency in procedures and decisions are detailed. The approach puts emphasis on straightforward common sense.

Such efforts would be helped by greater openness, however. Not only does the report not name names or disclose details of decisions (both of which it has discretion to do), but it does not pro- vide a breakdown of complaints or go into any detail about their nature. It remarks that there has been a “general upward trend” in recent years but the tribunal has not published a decision in years.

These questions are of particular relevance given that the tribunal’s report may be one of its last. That is because the long-delayed Legal Services Regulation Bill, which will overhaul the regulatory and disciplinary regime for lawyers, is approaching the final stages of its seemingly interminable passage through the Oireachtas. The centrepiece of the Bill is the Legal Services Regulatory Authority, which will take on responsibility for dealing with complaints about professional misconduct of solicitors and barristers.

Lawyers found to be engaged in serious misconduct will also be made amenable to the new Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal.

The designers of the new regime would do well to give serious thought to striking the right balance between fairness and transparency.