This concerns the position regarding a solicitor's costs and the effect on those in connection with their reference to the Law Society. It would be reasonable for the benefit of any non-legal Members of the Committee, if there are any here at all, to explain in some brief detail the operation of solicitor's costs and to say that the whole issue of a solicitor's costs is a very skillful and complex matter in itself. There are specialist professionals known as cost drawers who spend their lives doing this and nothing but this. They are not solicitors. They are not even lawyers. They are called cost drawers or legal accountants. The fancy new name is legal accountants but when I was growing up they were called cost drawers. That is a profession and a trade in itself. They become apprenticed over a period of years and then they practice. I presume there are professional firms in practice up and down the country but they are certainly in Dublin. I am not sure whether they are located in rural areas. They are specialists in the matter of solicitor's costs. I have been in practice as a solicitor now for some 40 years and I know very little about the complexities of solicitor's costs. I know a certain amount but not very much. Anything of substance that requires to be done is referred to one of these cost drawers' firms, who are independent people. They have offices down on the quays. Some of them are quite substantial firms having many partners in them. They do nothing else but assess solicitor's costs and arrange for them to be taxed by a taxing master. We are talking, on the amendments in connection with this section, about the giving of a decision by the Law Society on a reference as to what they will or will not do about a solicitor's bill of costs. I think it is fair to say that no member of the Law Society would take umbrage if I said that in all probability their knowledge of the intricacies of solicitors' costs is no greater than mine is and that they would have very little expertise in the detail of solicitors' costs. I am sure they would agree with that proposition. At least, I think they would.
For the purpose of the assessment of solicitors' costs there are court functionaries, civil servants known as taxing masters — I think there used to be only one in my early days but that there are more than one now — and they sit in the Four Courts in a kind of judicial way and matters of solicitors' costs are argued before them. They are paid by the State. They are independent, objective people. They are not practising lawyers. They are masters of the Court. That is a lesser role than a judge but nonetheless they exercise a sort of judicial function. Any solicitor's bill of costs can be sent there and that is the Taxing Master's job. That is his only job. He sits there all day examining solicitor's bills of costs and reducing them or varying them in accordance with his expertise. It is the cost drawers who would appear before him and argue about the bill and all the rest of it. They are independent people and they are also, as you will understand, highly skilled people in the matter of solicitors' costs because they deal with it all the time. They deal with nothing else but solicitors' costs. If we are setting out in legislation a position where solicitors' costs require to be assessed and examined and if necessary reduced in certain circumstances when there is already an established procedure there for doing that by experts, by objective people, by court officials appointed by the Government who deal with this all the time and who know, to the penny, what is right for any particular item and what is too much, why are we ignoring in this section the existence of the taxing masters who are the people to tax solicitors' costs and reduce them and deal with them as necessary as they are authorised to do. They are the specialist people to do it. We are purporting to give that function to the Law Society instead. The Law Society council or committees of the council who would be dealing with this are just ordinary practising solicitors like myself, many of them perhaps not in practice as long; and as regards their knowledge of the intricacies of costs or what is a correct cost or what is a fair figure to apply, quite frankly, I would not regard, myself, as being up to doing it. I would strongly suspect that they would not be too happy about doing it either. Where is the necessity to have them to do it anyway when the whole procedure and the whole system is already there in place. If the Minister were to bring in a section providing that, when a complaint is made to the Law Society and the adequacy or excessiveness of costs are called into question, the Law Society may then take that bill and refer it down to the Taxing Master to be examined, assessed and reduced if it is the Taxing Master's decision to do so, that would be a very understandable thing to do. I would fully support that position. If the Law Society has doubts or if anybody queries the costs then the Law Society who are examining the complaint may refer it down to the Taxing Master, the expert, the specialist who is skilled in it in the way that no council member of the Law Society would be. A further aspect of this matter, touched on by Deputy Shatter, is that the whole issue is left rather loose. Is this to be a usurping of the function of the Taxing Master — that the Law Society make a decision on the solicitors' costs — or is there to be an appeal from the Law Society's decision on the cost question to the Taxing Master or indeed to anywhere else. That is not very clear. There is an appeal from a decision of the Taxing Master to the High Court or the Circuit Court in the case of county registrars who also act as taxing masters. The only appeal from a section 8 position so far as costs are concerned, or indeed anything else, arises under section 11. Section 11 deals with appeals to the High Court against determination.
Rather strangely the only right of appeal given is by the solicitor. A solicitor is given a right of appeal and I wonder about that too. Say, for example, a client or an interested person makes a complaint and the Law Society make a decision that the bill, let us say that the bill was £1,000, was to be reduced to £750. Under section 11 the solicitor can appeal that. The client does not seem to be given any right of appeal as far as I can see, unless I am missing something. A client may say £750 is far too high, it should only be £500 or £200 and yet there seems to be no second forum to go to on appeal there. An appeal, let it be said, from a body that has no expertise in the area of assessment of taxation. It goes on to do a further strange thing. It says that, if the matter comes to the Law Society and they make a determination on a cost question and if the matter then goes to taxation or is referred to taxation, the figure that goes for taxation, the starting point is the Law Society's determination rather than the original bill. That is totally unacceptable. I would like to know if the Law Society have indicated their readiness and capabilities of dealing adequately with this assessment of costs. Be that as it may, if the inexpert or non-specialist body in this matter of solicitors costs makes a determination and the matter then goes on to the experts why should the starting point for that procedure be the Law Society determination. Why should the bill not go in its entirety as furnished and let the specialist, the independent, judicial, objective person who is a specialist in costs and as far as I know by no means generous, or certainly not over-generous, to solicitors deal with it. I suppose "fair" would be the best description of the Taxing Master's approach to solicitors' bills broadly speaking. Why not leave it to him to do his job and to exercise his speciality rather than put him in the position of having a pre-determined result as the starting point for his deliberations. I do not see the reality of it and that is the propose of my amendment.