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Master of High Court calls for reform of legal complaints system

Added on October 21, 2005


Carol Coulter, Legal Affairs Correspondent
21/10/2005

The Master of the High Court has called for changes in the system for dealing with complaints against solicitors.

Speaking on RT? radio yesterday, senior counsel Edmund Honohan said some lawyers seemed to have "lost their sense of outrage".

He said the present system for complaints was not working.

"It needs to be changed so that the public knows it has access to an impartial tribunal and will investigate its complaints."

Mr Honohan is the most senior official in the courts system involved in the preparation of major trials and High Court hearings.

He suggested that sometimes cases were run by lawyers more on the basis of the fees that would be due than on the basis of the best interests of clients.

However, the president of the Law Society, Owen Binchy, defended the society's regulation system at the Law Society's parchment ceremony yesterday evening, where new solicitors were welcomed into the profession.

"The deluge of complaints that some solicitors - in all likelihood a small minority - have double-charged vulnerable clients who were applicants to the Residential Institutions Redress Board has caused anger and revulsion to the overwhelming majority of solicitors throughout the length and breadth of the country," he said.

He said the society was determined "to root out and eradicate anything in the solicitors' profession which may have given rise to the despicable conduct which appears to have occurred in these cases".

He added that the actions of a few had detracted from the work of those solicitors who fought, against huge odds, for justice for those who were physically, sexually and psychologically brutalised in residential institutions in a dark period in Irish history.

Mr Honohan said he sees unnecessary work carried out in some of the cases that come before him. "Sometimes there seems to be a tendency for lawyers to see a case as a money-making exercise," he said.

Asked if judges could do something about this, he said judges were preoccupied with making decisions between the plaintiff and the defendant, and it was hard to decide also on quite another matter - whether a client should pay all costs charged by a solicitor.

However, he pointed out that in England there is jurisprudence, or judges' rulings, on "wasted costs", where the judge invited the solicitor to justify the costs incurred.


? The Irish Times

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