Bajans be good accountants, but they are excellent book-keepers, my uncle said to me one day, reminiscing over the many books – remember those things with pages between two covers? – he had not seen since lending them out to friends.
It seems that the one segment of the population this may not have applied to was the legal profession. Now we have the accountants stepping up to the plate and offering to make the lawyers better bookkeepers – of the QuickBooks variety.
This whole thing has just blown up in the media since the Speaker of the House of Assembly found himself being ordered by the High Court to pay money he owed to one of his clients, money which apparently came from the sale of land owned by the client’s deceased mother.
Another case or two have caught public eye since then, but whatever the specifics of them, it is nothing new to hear that lawyers in general take a long time to do anything, including (maybe especially) giving you money somebody paid to them on your behalf through the court.
At the Barbados Bar Association’s (BBA) Press conference, held last Thursday, the current president Tariq Khan, stared down the camera to say that it wasn’t the BBA’s fault that a few bad apples were spoiling the whole bunch. Yes, we do get between 50 and 70 cases a year complaining about lawyers, but that is less than one per cent of the profession. And besides, the BBA’s disciplinary committee can only make recommendations to the Court of Appeal, which has to decide if to reprimand or bar the offending attorney.
Many of these cases have not been acted on, but don’t blame us, it’s not our fault. Lawyers blaming lawyers while we suffer. Don’t you just love it? I humbly suggest that for every complaint that actually reaches the BBA in a formal way there are ten or 20 more bad experiences being had by consumers of legal services, mainly the poor, the old, the weak, the incapacitated, the frightened, and the unempowered, who are the silent victims of unethical legal practices, but do nothing about it.
And even when they do, little happens, as Mr Khan admits. I say, if the system is not working, you should be fighting for justice on behalf of all those innocents who come to your profession for help only to be further mistreated in some way by some of your fellow members.
If the Bar Association wants to represent all the good lawyers – the vast majority of the profession, it asserts – it needs to a less, well, defensive, approach.
May I congratulate the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Barbados (ICAB), through its vice president Andrew Brathwaite, for showing how it’s done. Without casting blame, ICAB took a proactive stance. In a Press release issued last week, it said it was willing to collaborate with the Bar Association on developing procedures for lawyers to voluntarily allow independent audits of their client accounts.
Doing so, it said, would bolster public confidence in the legal profession and help providers of legal services to protect the safety of their clients’ money. A win-win situation! Mr Brathwaite said that under the BBA’s Legal Profession Code of Ethics “attorneys are required to keep accounts that clearly and accurately distinguish funds held in trust for clients against the lawyer’s own finances”.
But he noted that this may not take place at all law practices if there was no external party checking to make sure what he termed “proper accounting” was being done.
He added that the BBA could look to the United Kingdom’s Solicitors Regulation Authority Rules for further guidelines on the protection of client accounts, and use it to update its 1988 code.
For example, said the ICAB vice president, the UK rules require any attorney who holds client money to provide an accountant’s report on their finances to the Solicitors Regulation Authority within six months of the end of each year.
Why did the Bar Association not think to take this more conciliatory route? I understand we are dealing with a Government which finds it hard to bestir itself over much of anything until election day draws near, but in this case, in the case of the BBA vs ICAB, I have to hand it to the latter.
Here is what you will find if you go to the website of the said Solicitors Regulation Authority (www.sra.org.uk) among other tips:
“The Legal Ombudsman is an impartial organisation which has powers to resolve complaints about lawyers and the services they provide. They will look at both sides and help you and the lawyer come to an agreement about what should happen next. . .They can ask the lawyer to apologise to you, refund your fees, or even pay you compensation if you’ve lost out or been badly treated.” – from a video by Solicitor’s Regulation Authority. You can also visit www.legalombudsman.org.uk.
But instead of lobbying for something like that, the BBA just blames the bench.
