Lawyers in Ukraine are not ready for lawyer monopoly, it is premature for Ukraine, Vitaliy Savchuk, a lawyer and adviser to Legal Alliance has said.
“I see the lawyer monopoly premature until at least a few of these questions have been answered in the affirmative. The monopoly should be preceded by serious training for lawyers,” he told Interfax-Ukraine.
According to Savchuk, the lawyer monopoly does not guarantee that the client will receive high-quality legal services.
“When I first started working as a lawyer, I was surprised when I heard from opponents references to norms that had long ceased to be valid. “Are they more unprofessional or unethical?” I asked myself. Some of them were lawyers. The problem of the lawyer monopoly has always been more philosophical than legal,” he said.
Savchuk said that the end consumer, the client, should benefit from the reform of the defense attorneys. At the same time, the lawyer asks a number of questions, in particular, if there is a noticeable increase in the quality of the provision of legal services over the past three or four years, if the bar is effectively protecting lawyers whose rights are violated by the state, if it is really never abusing the powers of the lawyers themselves, and if it guarantees that no one cheats during the lawyer’s exam, and whether the lawyer’s exam is an actual criterion.
“Has the bar of Ukraine become such an institution with strong reputation that every lawyer wants to be a part of it? Of course, the number of lawyers has grown by double-digit percentage over the past two years preceding the introduction of the monopoly. However, it is such an incredible sudden popularity of this status that indicates that far not all lawyers sought to join the bar, they had to join it, and also that a huge percentage of lawyers did not believe in the real benefit of the lawyer’s status, and clients did not trust lawyers because of the lawyer’s certificate,” he said.
Savchuk said that despite the references of “ideologists of the lawyer monopoly in Ukraine to the Western experience,” this experience proves that “the monopoly is not the cause, but the result of many years, or even centuries of evolution of the bar as a guarantor of professionalism and protection of the rights of lawyers from state arbitrariness.”
The lawyer also expressed the opinion that the issue of lawyer monopoly can be resolved without amending the Constitution.
“Even these states, which laws are sometimes called a model, did not solve the issue of monopoly at the level of the Constitution, since for outstanding constitutions, the lawyer monopoly is a too derivative and dependent issue. This issue can be resolved by other laws,” he said.
“Of course, when changes to the Constitution are a matter of a purely parliamentary majority, not law-making technique, then school lunches can be implemented in the Constitution, but I would leave such reforms to one neighboring country,” the lawyer said.
