COUNCIL COMES TO CARDIFF

It’s the day before the FA Cup final. In accordance with the habit of a lifetime I am writing this article immediately before the deadline. Posters wishing City good luck at Wembley hang from lamp-posts and the team is travelling to London today. At the Swalec Stadium Glamorgan are leading Derbyshire after the first innings of their first home match of the county championship season. Now that the cricket season has arrived, the brief interval of good weather we’ve enjoyed since May Day has passed.

Let’s hope that by the time you read this Cardiff City are the FA Cup champions, Glamorgan are topping the second division of the county championship as both teams do their best to emulate Wales, the Six Nations champions, and sunny weather has returned. And let’s hope that the good weather lasts for a couple of weeks so that the Law Society’s Council sees the capital city at its best, as a champions’ city.

The Law Society council is meeting in Cardiff on 17 and 18 June. Various events have been planned by Chancery Lane and the Law Society’s Wales committee has contributed to them – the intention is to show the council how devolution works in Wales. The council meeting will take place in the Senedd and all solicitors who wish to are welcome to watch the public part of the meeting on the morning of 18 June. This is only the second time the council has met in Cardiff – I believe that it is also only the second time the council has met outside London - so, if you’re interested take this opportunity to see the council in action (or, as cynics might prefer, council inaction!).

Driving to Cardiff Bay for a council meeting will be quite a change to my routine. During the nearly two years I have been on council I have had either to get up at an ungodly hour to catch the 6.50 train or to saunter into the station at lunchtime to take an afternoon train to Paddington the day before. According to the tickets the journeys are first class (that must amount to a misdescription). The highlight of these journeys is popping into the first class lounge at platform 1 to have a quick cup of coffee and a complimentary copy of The Times from Lena, if I’m travelling in the morning, or Geri if it’s an afternoon journey. I won’t miss the train ride because it’s always late into Paddington, or the combination of Bakerloo Line and Central Line (when it’s operating) which lands me at Chancery Lane. I’m a regular traveller now – in addition to council meetings, I travel to Chancery Lane for meetings of the Housing Law committee and the Education and Training committee. My third committee, the Wales committee, meets, conveniently, at Capital Tower.

The Housing Law committee is one of the Law Society’s 18 law reform committees. They do invaluable work responding to consultation papers published by the government, Civil Justice Council, Law Commission, LSC and others on proposed changes to legislation, procedure, practice and funding. These committees usually consist of a mix of council members and other solicitors, all of whom are appointed after a rigorous process of application and interview. A number of distinguished local practitioners have been or still are members of one of these committees and I am sure that they would agree that the law reform committees do a great deal of work, which is by and large unheralded, for the benefit of the public, society, the government, clients and the profession. Anything done to make the law or its attendant procedure simpler, clearer and fairer benefits us all: this is what the law reform committees aim to do. Because the work involves looking at law and procedure I find it interesting and stimulating.

I haven’t counted the Wales committee as one of the law reform committees, though it has a great deal of overlap with the law reform committees. It looks at the development of legislation in Wales and deals with policy issues relating to the use of the Welsh language by the Law Society and promotes the use of the Welsh language in the delivery of legal services in Wales. In these respects it is accountable to the Legal Affairs and Policy Board (which is the board to which the law reform boards are accountable). However, some of its activities are clearly more membership-focused, such as disseminating information about the activities of the National Assembly and the impact of legislation passed by the Assembly to solicitors in Wales.

Apart from the law reform committees and membership services committees that report to the Membership Board, the Law Society has set up three committees to shadow the activities of our friendly regulator, the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority. These committees deal with education and training, rules and ethics and indemnity insurance (another committee was set up to deal with accreditation but is dormant at present). Given the SRA’s propensity to issue consultation documents dealing with important issues giving short deadlines for responding, the work of these committees is important. In the next Issue of Legal News I will be writing about the new LPC, which is due to take effect in 2009 or 2010 (depending upon which year the LPC provider wishes to implement it). In a future issue I will be writing about the proposed work-based learning stage of solicitors’ training, which will replace the training contract.

So, the Law Society is continuing to do good work to improve the law, to provide membership services and to shadow the regulator. As you know, at Easter time the Law Society reached an agreement with the in relation to its challenge to the unified civil contract. This resulted in marginal improvements in the rates of pay for some LSC funded work, a delay in the introduction of CLACs and CLANs until April 2010, an amnesty on unrecouped payments on account over 6 years old where the amount outstanding is less than £20,000, a 6 month delay to the introduction of best value tendering for criminal cases until July 2009 and no price competitive tendering for civil or family work before 2013. Although the result is an outcome that many legal aid lawyers would not have been happy with 18 months ago, it is better than what had been put forward as a final proposal and represents something of a victory. The Law Society has been seen to fight for its members on legal aid and forced the government/LSC to back off, despite the government enjoying a healthy majority in Parliament.

I hope, therefore, that local practitioners will give the Law Society a warm reception when council comes to Cardiff later this month. The Law Society has changed and it continues to change. Gone are the days when the Law Society chose not to fight the creation of the Legal Aid Board to administer civil legal aid. Today it seems incredible that only 20 years ago the Law Society administered civil legal aid in England and Wales – it was administered by solicitors, for solicitors. That position was untenable, so the Law Society’s appeasement was sensible, but it became a habit as on successive occasions the Society chose not to fight for the interests of solicitors. That is why office holders and chief executives have found themselves in the hot seat when they have come to Cardiff to explain what Chancery Lane is doing. On this occasion the reception should be warmer - let’s hope the weather will be, too.

David Dixon

Centre For Professional Legal Studies

Cardiff Law School,

Museum Avenue

Cardiff

CF10 3UX

TEL: 029 2087 4941

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