A group of professional advisers will this week attempt to prise open Scotland's legal services market to greater competition, heralding an end to the long-standing monopoly enjoyed by solicitors and advocates.
Glasgow-based organisation the Association of Commercial Attorneys has applied for its members to be allowed to represent clients in Scotland's courts and be paid for it - a move that will end centuries of tradition.
The association has today sent a 48-page application for paid audience rights to new Holyrood Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill, himself a former partner in a legal firm. Its members are mainly experts in construction law.
The association admits its members would be in "direct competition" with solicitor members of the Law Society of Scotland in the conduct of civil litigation, should the application be accepted.
An inquiry commissioned by the Scottish Executive into competition in legal services recommended last year that paid advocacy rights be granted to people who are not members of the Law Society of Scotland or Faculty of Advocates.
Reform campaigners have argued that the measure will make it easier and cheaper for the less-well-off to secure access to justice. Solicitors and advocates can charge hundreds of pounds an hour, rates which critics believe would not be so high but for the monopoly enjoyed by the two main professional bodies.
Legislation which should already have freed up the advocacy market lay dormant on the statute book for 16 years before the measure was finally incorporated into the legal profession bill passed by the Holyrood Parliament in 2006. Sections 25 to 29 of the Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) (Scotland) 1990 abolished the ban on non-lawyers applying for rights of audience in Scottish courtrooms. However, the sections were never acted upon, for reasons which were never fully explained.
In 1990 ministers gave an undertaking that the clauses would not be implemented until other reforms in the act, such as the introduction of solicitor-advocates, had been given time to "bed down". This undertaking, and the fact that the measures never saw the light of day, provided ammunition for critics of the lawyers' "closed shop".
The same representation rights have long existed in England and Wales in relation to members of the Institute of Legal Executives and the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents.
The Office of Fair Trading and the Scottish Consumer Council were also strongly in favour of those rights being extended north of the border. The House of Commons trade and industry select committee also pressed the Office of Fair Trading on the issue.
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