Solicitors could find themselves approaching barristers for work as the bar takes advantage of new freedoms approved last month, the incoming chairman of the Bar Council told the Gazette this week.
Nicholas Green QC said there would be a reversal of the ‘normal order of things’ if barristers make use of rules agreed by the Bar Standards Board last month, which would allow them to set up procurement companies to contract for high volumes of work.
The procurement companies would contract directly with volume purchasers of legal services such as the Legal Services Commission, insurance companies or local authorities.
Green said the procurement companies would be commercial vehicles which would not themselves provide legal services, but would administer and bid for legal services. They would enable barristers to practise in the traditional chambers model, and set up a separate company with other barristers or solicitors to bid for bulk contracts.
He said barristers could set up consortia with solicitors to provide a composite service, covering advice, litigation and advocacy. The barristers’ procurement companies could then instruct their own panels of solicitors, rather than solicitors instructing the bar, as happens now.
Meanwhile Green said one of the priorities for his year as chairman would be to ‘do a deal with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)’ over the amount of work it keeps in-house. He said the bar was having a series of confidential discussions with the CPS to ‘find a way of reconciling the fact of life that the CPS is in the court advocating and stability for the self-employed bar’.
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