The Law Society is to defend the status of in-house lawyers against a controversial Luxembourg ruling barring them from appearing as advocates before the European Union’s top court.

The Society is to lodge an application to intervene in an appeal against a 2010 ruling by the General Court of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU), arguing that the ruling deepens the distinction between in-house and other lawyers, and adds weight to perceptions that in-house lawyers are not ‘real’ lawyers.

The Society’s president, John Wotton, has also written to justice secretary Kenneth Clarke to express his ‘profound disappointment’ that the government has decided not to intervene in an appeal ‘of great importance to our members, and to the UK companies for whom they work’.

The CJEU ruling arose in Prezes Urzedu Komunikacji Elektronicznej, when two in-house lawyers submitted an application on behalf of the chief executive of Polish company UKE.

The court ruled that the employed status of the two lawyers was incompatible with their obligation to provide legal assistance ‘in full independence and in the overriding interests of justice’. The court added: ‘Consequently, the application must be rejected on the basis of inadmissibility.’

Wotton said that the order strengthened the precedent value of the CJEU’s ruling in Akzo Nobel, which ruled that in-house lawyers could not rely upon legal professional privilege (LPP) in competition cases. He said: ‘This case concerns the standing of in-house lawyers at the CJEU, not LPP. If the court were to accept the application of the Akzo principle in this case, it risks being used as a precedent in other areas of European law concerning the rights of UK companies to use in-house lawyers.’

The European Company Lawyers Association is also planning to intervene.