Page 3825 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 8 November 1994
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LEGAL PRACTITIONERS (AMENDMENT) BILL 1994
Debate resumed from 13 October 1994, on motion by Mr Connolly:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MR HUMPHRIES (8.02): Madam Speaker, the Legal Practitioners (Amendment) Bill is more or less a mechanical Bill which deals with a number of small, but significant, improvements to the operation of the Legal Practitioners Act. This Act is quite important in the operation of the legal profession in the ACT, particularly solicitors. It ensures that practitioners are meeting a high level of accountability in their operation in the ACT. The Act provides for a considerable degree of self-regulation of the legal profession in the Territory. It is incumbent, therefore, that that self-regulation be accompanied by a legal framework which exhibits a high standard of accountability. In that sense, the privilege of self-regulation carries with it special responsibilities.
Apparently, the Act is considered by the Government to be deficient in some ways. As a result, some amendments are brought forward to deal with a number of areas, including the issuing of practising certificates to persons outside the ACT; the requirements relating to statements of costs and the way in which they are accounted for to clients at the end of a relationship with a lawyer; the capacity of the fidelity fund to meet payments out of it for people who have suffered a loss at the hands of a solicitor who has either lost or stolen the money from that client; and other matters, including the power of the Supreme Court to reprimand a barrister.
One of the few provisions that I wish to examine in respect of this matter is that of controlled moneys. Under this legislation, the audit of a solicitor's accounts which is conducted annually is to include, for the first time, an item called "controlled moneys", which is defined to include not only money but also valuable securities such as share scrip, negotiable instruments and land title documents. The idea is that, if a solicitor has to indicate through this audit what in his or her possession is of value, it is important to be able to look not just at money but also at other documents or things which may be inherently valuable.
I have no problem with this idea in principle. It is obviously desirable for solicitors to be as prepared to account for everything they hold of value as they are presently prepared to account for the money that they hold. However, I anticipate, in principle at least, some difficulty in lawyers actually having a method of accounting for those sorts of documents. I recall that in my own time in private practice I had very strict requirements for moneys that I held on behalf of clients, and they would be properly accounted for in separate trust accounts for those clients; but I had no such system to account for the documents I held specifically in relation to each client. There would be an index system for documents held in our deed register. There would also be care taken to make sure that documents kept on files were secured on those files. But, in my period in service as a solicitor, there was not necessarily any method of accounting for or keeping control over particular valuable documents. They were obviously not unsafe; but, by the same token, they were not in some kind of register.
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