Legal fees still extraordinarily high

There is a culture of entitlement amongst lawyers to a lifestyle that is obscenely excessive in this society. By Vincent Browne.

Two barristers, Eddie Walsh and Constance Cassidy, are themselves parties to a legal action concerning the 410-acre Lissadell estate, which they purchased in 2003 for €4 million and on which they have spent about €9.5 million in restoration costs. The case taken by the barristers against Sligo County Council, which concerns rights of way over parts of the estate, ran for 58 days and the legal costs are estimated to run to €6 million.

Assuming there were two barristers on each side and a solicitor, there were six lawyers in all. And assuming that the six lawyers were involved for all of the 58 days of the hearing, this works out at an average of €14,706 per day, per lawyer. I know, I know, there will have been weeks, months, maybe even years before the case came to court and during that time, the lawyers will have been working on their briefs. And sure, even though there would also have been some direct costs to them such as postage, phone charges, photocopying, perhaps some expert consultancy work costing a few thousand, the cost per lawyer, based on the number of days in court, would still be well over €10,000.

(Picture: Lissadell House, Sligo)

It will be just too bad for this society if Eddie Walsh and Constance Cassidy win the case, for this society will have to foot the €6 million legal bill. Even Eddie Walsh and Constance Cassidy will find it tough if they lose, for €6 million still means something, even to well-paid lawyers. Eddie Walsh and Constance Cassidy are well-paid lawyers, for how could they have afforded the €13.5 million they have already spent in Lissadell House, their second home, if they weren’t well-paid?

I am focusing on Eddie Walsh and Constance Cassidy simply because of recent reports of the likely costs of their action against Sligo Council.

The legal costs issue has got prominence recently because of the report in this newspaper of the extraordinary fees charged by barristers and a solicitor, a total of €2.14 million, in a case taken by a person suing the Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB). The Taxing Master (the courts official who adjudicates on disputes over legal costs) reduced the fees by 82 per cent.

I have some sympathy for the barristers involved in this case, because I understand they were unaware of the fees being charged on their account but, nonetheless, the fees charged on their behalf arose from a culture of entitlement in the legal profession, entitlement to a lifestyle that is obscenely excessive in our society.

And that same culture pervades other professions, notably the medical, dental, accountancy and financial professions.

And many of these sort of people are foremost in a new campaign to have the minimum wage reduced from its present level of €8.65 an hour, which works out at €328.70 per 38-hour week and €15,778 per 48-week year.

For professional advice on how we should deal with the banking crisis, the State has paid €17 million in fees to legal, financial, property and other consultants – the very class that drove us into the crisis. And the Government is planning on making this considerably worse. Nama is now projecting that the costs of professional fees and expenses over a 10-year period will be of the order of €2 billion or €200million a year (and this is a revised figure of the original estimate of €2.4 billion).

This will drive up professional fees generally, certainly legal, financial and property fees, and will do enormous damage to the economy and our competitiveness.

I have a few proposals. The first is that all professionals are paid on a per-hour basis and on that basis alone (this was proposed by the Report on the Legal Costs Working Group in 2006 and nothing was done about it). And that they are required to submit all their charges to a regulatory authority annually to check that they are not charging different clients for the same hours.

You know the old joke that because Abraham lived until he was 175 years old he must have been an accountant – because only accountants charge out that number of hours? The idea here would be to catch the Abrahams in the legal, medical, financial and other professions.

The second proposal is that the charge per hour be related to the minimum wage. I would like if there were no more than a gap of five between the highest earning and lowest earning in society. But since many people think this would be the thin end of the wedge of a communist dictatorship, with gulags, Ladas and bad vodka, let’s agree on, say, 12 times, which would leave professional fees at a maximum of €103.20 per hour working out at €88,237 per year (38-hour week, 48-week year), which is quite enough for anybody.