Back on the home front

So September draws to an end, another conference month for me. Although my brain is still catching up with July, the rest of my year in office will now be spent working in this country. Conferences are fun and exhilarating to attend, but hard work too. The recurring themes of the rule of law and access to justice mentioned in this column last month continued through the Commonwealth Law (CLA) and International Bar Association (IBA) conferences.

The CLA session on access to justice stressed that governments should remember that inadequately funding a legal aid system leads to additional costs in the long term. There was also a clear message that ease of access to the courts should be permitted. With our small claim and summary cause limits unchanged for nearly two decades it seems to me that this is an actual barrier to justice in some cases. In Britain, legal aid was set up post-war to be a front line service alongside health and education. This should still be the aim. In Nigeria, for instance, the majority of people in prison are those awaiting trial but who are too poor to afford a lawyer and seek bail from the court. I am proud that in Scotland we do still have a recognisable legal aid system. We must keep it and value it.

The IBA too concentrated on access to justice and the rule of law. The organisation’s President wants the IBA to take the lead in asserting the independence of the profession and promoting its core values, and he unveiled a campaign to raise awareness of these issues. There were several Scots in Prague, which reinforces the importance of the organisation. When the IBA makes a clear statement on something, it will have an impact. The issues discussed can seem distant for the profession at home, but affect the heart of what we do in our day-to-day work.

And so I come back to the topic of complaints handling. At the IBA the President of the Law Society of England and Wales was clear that in the past they underfunded their complaints handling system and as a result could not cope with the volume of complaints a few years ago. How ironic that now their system does appear to be adequately resourced, control of how they handle complaints will soon pass to an independent board. They have been judged on their past performance rather than the present. In his speech at the opening of the Scottish Parliament, the First Minister focused very much on law and the justice system. Once again, we all hope that the present reality is looked at rather than any perceived inadequacies of the past, both in considering law in general and complaints in particular. The Society will continue to work with the Scottish Parliament to improve the law for the people of Scotland. It is quite clear, given the volume of legislation proposed, that the Society’s Executive and law reform team will be under increasing pressure in the coming year.

At home there have been several important conferences. There was a successful joint conference with the European Academy of Law, the Crown Office, the Faculty of Advocates and the Society dealing with such timely topics as European extradition warrants. Nothing but the Net has had its sixth successive year and was fully subscribed. This is a testament to the hard work of the contributors and of the Update team. The legal aid conference at the end of October is set to be sold out once again and the In-House Lawyers’ AGM is on 4 November. The Update Department is also to be congratulated on the production and release of the CD-Rom dealing with practice management issues (compulsive viewing I am assured – or is that compulsory?). It will be a useful tool either for group study or individuals, especially those who have to travel far for training events.

And of course when I am out of the country the hard work by the Society’s Council and Executive continues. We have responded to the legal aid consultation paper “Advice for All”. We are about to publish our diversity strategy and the joint research by the Society and the Equal Opportunities Commission into women in the profession. 

Having now four months as President under my (tightening) belt, it is clear that Scotland has an active, respected and dynamic profession. I am trying to live up to this when at foreign “fixtures”. I was a little worried, therefore, when the President of the Canadian Bar Association, a man for whom I have great respect, told the ever well-behaved Michael Clancy that I was “a modicum of decorum”. Surely he meant “model”? I did not press the point!