A bleak legal house

Last week the BBC started a multi-part dramatisation of what is argueably Charles Dickens' best work, the huge novel Bleak House. It is a devastating critique of the legal system as operated around the courts of Chancery in London in the 19th Century, when lawyers acted with deep cynicism, concerned more with gaining money and power for themselves than with any sense of justice.

Dickens started life as a journalist and wrote Bleak House as an indictment of the lawyers and the legal system he witnessed while court reporting. Should he suddenly find himself back in the present day Four Courts in Dublin, he would find himself in familiar territory. From the wigs and gowns, to the inaudible mumbling, the delays and the huge costs at every turn, precious little seems to have changed in 150 years.

It is ironic that it is solicitors who have been in the spotlight for over charging recently, because it is only when barristers get involved in a case that costs really rack up.

The solicitors who double charged their clients for their appearances at the child abuse commission are beneath contempt. The framework for the payment of costs by the commission is set out in detail and the level of costs were agreed only after lengthy consultations with lawyers and their representatives. Indeed discussions over the level of costs to be paid to lawyers caused considerable delay to the work of the commission getting underway in the first place. For solicitors then to double charge their clients for work they were being very adequately compensated for, is something which should be investigated by the gardaí. Any arguments that clients signed documents agreeing to the charges are spurious and will not stand up in any court the offending solicitors might find themselves.

But it is around the Law Library that the characters portrayed in Bleak House are still to be found in great numbers. The cartoonist Scratch marked the beginning of a new legal term a few years ago with a cartoon showing barristers bowing before a £ (pound) symbol. It is an image which should be printed as a warning to students entering the profession. I have spent enough time around the Four Courts to realise that in many cases the dispensing of justice is little more than a game for many members of the Law Library. I have witnessed the opening of high profile criminal cases where it is obvious to everyone in the room that one or two of the legal representatives have only the merest familiarity with their brief. Barristers are paid huge sums to study briefs before cases, but you sometimes end up with the impression that one or two of them hadn't even read the newspaper cuttings of a case before they step into court.

In other cases it often appears that the main tactic involved in the defence of their client is to try and collapse a case. Blaming the media is a favourite, with the tired argument that pre-trial publicity made the possibility of a fair trial a non-runner. On that logic if Adolf Hitler were found alive and well and living in Ireland, he could never stand trial, but that doesn't stop the argument being put forward at great length every time there is a high-profile criminal trial. And of course the longer it goes on, the more the costs rise. It is not totally contradictory that the longer a barrister can drag out a case, the more inefficiencies he causes, the more he gets paid.

Even the master of the High Court, Edmund Holohan, seems to be tired of lawyers. He recently castigated solicitors for lacking a sense of outrage at the manifest inequities in our society and instead being more interested in making money. The same could be said of barristers. Indeed the Ballinasloe Horse Fair has nothing on the round hall of the Four Courts on a busy morning, with barristers settling cases on the steps of the courts. Why do barristers have to be involved in this? Why don't the solicitors just agree the settlement and save money? Why do barristers have to be involved in cases which are settled without a hearing at the abuse commission? The answer of course is that while the Taxing Master will at the end of the day pass judgment on whether or not the amount of costs are justified, the incurring of barristers costs in the first place is hardly ever questioned. Who cares anyway if you are going to get your costs paid by the other side or by the state, seems to be the mindset.

The question of value for money is utterly alien to lawyers, little wonder then that some solicitors chose to double charge for their work. Makes you wonder if the concept of justice is just as alien. Is Dickens still right?

Fergal Keane is a reporter with RTÉ radio's Five Seven Live