The National Legal Profession Reform Consultative Group
The Legal Profession Taskforce is required to consult on draft national legislation for uniform laws to regulate the legal profession.
The National Legal Profession Reform Consultative Group is chaired by Professor Michael Lavarch, Executive Dean at Queensland University of Technology and former Commonwealth Attorney-General. Queensland Law Society CEO Noela L’Estrange is an active member of this Group.
The Consultative Group advises and assists the Legal Profession Reform Taskforce in its work. The Consultative Group includes members from every state and territory and represents expertise from regulators, the courts, consumers, the legal profession and legal educators. It considers discussion papers issued by the Taskforce.
The draft National Profession Bill and Rules were presented to COAG and released for a public consultation of three months, which ended on 13 August 2010. Submissions from the consultative group and the Queensland Law Society are available to download.
Papers considered by the Consultative Group
The Consultative Group’s Responses to Taskforce Papers
Responding to the Taskforce papers
As members may be aware, the National Legal Profession Reform (NLPR) Taskforce stated in December that it would not be issuing any further discussion papers, but would be concentrating on submissions made to it, and drafting the Bill, which was due for release at the end of January/early February, for a month of more public consultation and submissions.
In advance of the draft Bill, the nine members of the NLPR Consultative Group who are either executives or council members of law societies or bar associations decided that it would be useful for that group to coordinate a response to each of the issued Taskforce papers. This work has now been completed, with authorship being shared, and much consultation on the content. In some cases, there are still some jurisdictional preferences, but on the whole, the entire group agreed with the responses. None of this precludes specific jurisdictions making other submissions. I understand that the Law Council of Australia would support the submissions made by the members of the Consultative Group.
The proposed regulatory structure
The only paper to which there is not a specific response from this group is the first high level paper on the proposed structure. The Law Council endorsed an initial response to that paper. Given the time-frames, the group decided that it was a better approach to wait for the draft Bill to issue, and to respond to that, as it will be more specific, and hopefully, more detailed. At some stage, a regulatory impact statement should also issue, which should contain information about cost impacts of the proposals.
Costs of reform proposals
To date, the Taskforce has issued no information at all on the costs of any part of the proposals contained in the discussion papers. We remain very concerned about this, as clearly it is almost impossible to either comment on or assess the practical impact of proposals without some reference to costing. We await with great interest any information on costs, and we will be assessing the impact of the proposed changes on the costs to the profession and how they will affect our members.
We also remain of the strong view that the issued papers relied on very general (and sometimes generic) statements. They contained little or no real data and yet proposed some quite extensive changes. Whilst we support the moves to consistent national standards as sensible, we do not concede that the current system is in need of radical change and we generally do not see the need to establish extensive new bureaucracies, which will be costly both to establish and maintain.
Finally, and importantly, Queensland Law Society considers that any move towards the Executive being wholly responsible for appointing the national board members, who would set professional standards (including the basis for admission), is an inherent challenge to the independence of the legal profession, and is inconsistent with the separation of powers.
Response to Taskforce discussion papers on:
