Tribunal legal costs - Fee reform a step in right direction

POPULAR perceptions of fat-cat lawyers, pockets bulging with tribunal cash and laughing all the way to the bank will soon be dispelled, relatively speaking anyway, if Finance Minister Charlie McCreevy has his way.

In a commendable attempt to put the brakes on the tribunal gravy train, the Government has introduced a radical new pay structure for tribunal barristers.

Hopefully, from the taxpayer’s perspective, this initiative will curb fees and reduce the length of tribunals and similar inquiries. Expected to drag on for years, it would be a good day’s work.

By any assessment, lawyers are raking in outrageous sums of money. Many have become millionaires overnight. A public grown cynical in the face of such excesses will welcome moves to slash fees by 40%, reducing payments from a staggering €2,500 a day to under €1,000.

In the elitist world of the Law Library, a good barrister is said to command his own fees.

Thus, it remains to be seen if the leading practitioners will continue to perform tribunal work under the new rates set by the Government.

Anecdotally, when the measures come into force in September they are expected to walk away from the tribunals in droves.

But surely the suggestion that you cannot get a good barrister for under €1,000 a day is in itself a damning comment on the outlandish fees being charged by lawyers.

Under the present system, individual barristers agree their fees with clients, in this case the Government.

Arguably, the multi-layered structure of the profession, in which senior counsel are backed up by junior barristers and solicitors, is primarily to blame for the exorbitant fee levels.

In seeking to reform the system, the State is determined to move away from a regime based on a daily rate and replace it with a contractual arrangement involving an annual salary for the job.

In the eyes of the beleaguered taxpayer, who ultimately has to pick up the bill, that makes a lot of sense.

Some insight into the huge amounts of money involved was glimpsed yesterday at the Mahon tribunal where disgraced ex-Minister Ray Burke opened his application for the State to pay legal costs of €10 million.

A question yet to be resolved is whether the State is legally entitled to renegotiate tribunal deals in midstream.

Another imponderable is whether top lawyers will abandon the Government side and hire themselves out to wealthy developers willing to pay over the odds for their expertise.

Doubtless, any other profession would view the new fees with envy. Under the deal, senior counsel will get €213,098 per annum, or €989 per day; junior counsel will earn €142,065 per annum, or €646 per day; and solicitors would receive €176,000 per annum, or €800 daily, and €100 an hour for tribunal work undertaken outside of the actual hearings.

In comparative terms, the new pay rate on offer represents a significant drop. Putting it in a national context, however, it amounts to more than seven times the average industrial wage.

Lawyers do not have a God-given right to earn vast sums of money.

In PR terms, the tribunals have been a disaster for a profession whose manifest greed has drawn the denigration and contempt of the public.

With taxpayers so far picking up a staggering €440m bill for tribunal legal costs, the Government is right to cut the income of fat-cat lawyers.