Fink’s report on Vixit … Discontent with Law Council’s travel expenditure … Conferenceville … Victorian Bar wants more LCA money spent on barristers’ problems … No plan B for the Leave case
THE Yarraside bar’s Vixit battle continues with reports at 20 paces on whether to stay with the Law Council of Australia or sail off into outer space as a tiny, lonely planet.
VicBar bigwigs commissioned a report from retired judge Ray Finkelstein on whether to Remain with the LCA or Leave.
The Law Council has also submitted a report to bar members on the Stay case.
Finkelstein, who served a one-year stint as Victoria’s solicitor-general in 1992, was tasked with preparing a report on the “costs and benefits arising from VicBar’s membership of the LCA” and, subsequently, “whether Vic Bar should continue to be a member of the LCA”.
Chief among Finkelstein’s dissatisfactions was the LCA’s expenses. He singled out the LCA’s generous travel allowance, which paid out $1,295,369 (domestic) and $440,410 (international) for 2015.
“Little to no effort has been made to introduce teleconferencing as a means of cutting down travel costs,” Finkelstein said.
“Returning to the attendances at other meetings, conferences and seminars, there is a general feeling (though difficult to test) that an excessive number of LCA representatives attend conferences.”
For its part the LCA argues that it has taken up the tools of the internet and is digitally literate:
“Specific criticisms of expenditure made in the report, for the first time, are incorrect or can easily be raised for consideration. For example, the LCA does already use teleconferencing and increasingly, videoconferencing, to facilitate meetings of the executive, directors, CEOs, committees and staff.”
However, Finkelstein was mainly concerned with whether the LCA failed to address “areas of potential, if not real, difficulty confronting practice at the bar”.
VicBar’s laundry list of grievances include the:
- Declining amount of cases that go to trial;
- Increased competition from solicitors hoovering-up pre-trial and trial work;
- Challenges arising from the “digital revolution”;
- Outsourcing of legal services to foreign entities; and
- Expansion of in-house legal departments.
Though a withdrawal would have little to no effect upon the LCA’s operations, representing only 2.9 percent of its income – “at best it might be an irritant” – Finkelstein contends that “if other bars followed Victoria’s lead, there will be a decline in the LCA’s reputation”.
“In a practical sense, the LCA would become a solicitors’ institution,” he said.
Finkelstein thinks that that the Australian Bar Association would not, and could not, “fill the gap” of the LCA.
“The immediate and future interests of barristers will be better served if the annual membership fee which goes to the LCA is directed toward attempting to overcome problems that confront barristers.”
The LCA advances three arguments for Remain:
- The LCA is best placed to influence national policy and laws;
- There is no alternative national body capable of fulfilling this role now, or in the short term; and
- The cost of membership is worthwhile.
Appealing to the credentials of its secessionists, the LCA observed that, following the commencement of Fiona McLeod SC’s presidency in 2017, “seven of the last thirteen presidents will have been barristers, three of whom are from the Victorian bar”.
The LCA also spruiked its media success and political access.
“The LCA has generated (or had its position reflected) in over 1000 stories reaching over 42 million Australians.”
In the months following the last federal election, the LCA claims it had met with 15 cabinet members, opposition front-benchers and key senate cross-benchers.
Acknowledging the particular problems facing barristers, raised by Finkelstein, the LCA says that “the trend of keeping control of litigation in-house by the big firms, in-house counsel and public defenders is not reversed by withdrawing from the national peak body”.
Indeed, in its most forceful point to Yarraside barristers the LCA simply noted, “there is no plan B”.