Distinguished British lawyer Arthur Marriott QC, as quoted by Richard Ackland in the Sydney Morning Herald, and perhaps not entirely irrelevant to the situation in some other countries too:
The great ideas to assist the poor and bring about access to justice, such as the introduction of legal aid, have been met with an explosion in the number of lawyers. Other schemes such as no win-no fees encourage predatory lawyering. The payment of lawyers on a time basis does not provide an incentive for the efficient conduct of trials. And finally, efforts to reform the litigation system have systematically been sabotaged and wrecked by lawyers. As Napoleon said, the administration of justice is too important to be left to lawyers.
(“The rise and rise of the predatory lawyer”, Nov. 18).
2 Comments
I am having difficulty in seeing the connection between government funded “access to justice” for the indigent and predatory lawyers. I agree that there has been an explosion in the number of law school graduates, but I doubt that most of them have aspirations to work for legal aid services. In my experience as a former legal aid attorney and currently as a court appointed attorney in juvenile cases, those who choose to do this kind of work are not in it for the money.
I believe that with the wide expansion of state-funded legal aid in the U.K. there have arisen complaints that the program has relaxed its once-tough standards for meritoriousness in the selection of claims to back. This particular controversy (which does not have an exact U.S. parallel) should be seen as distinct from the other problems Marriott cites, including that of “predatory lawyers”, where the debates in the U.K. more closely echo those here.