Solicitors’ failings

Celebrating the latest admissions ceremony for new solicitors, Eilidh Wiseman, president of the Law Society of Scotland, informed us that “our core responsibilities as solicitors to our clients remain unchanged. We will help our clients through the most important events of their lives”. (The Scotsman, 2 March).

Indeed, and many of those clients justifiably contend that the “help” often includes ineptitude, incompetence, pomposity, brutal fees, woeful advocacy, ignorance of the law, fits of toddler pique when clients politely reject risible “advice’”and an alarming capacity for slavishly accepting untenable “opinions” from QCS.

The “help” does not stop there. Some solicitors, in response to the “most important events in their clients’ lives”, may even voluntarily indulge in odious misconduct. When distressed, disturbed and deeply perturbed clients send their complaints to the Law Society, they eventually learn that their complaints are meticulously processed through a system suffused with innate bias.

The complaints are then exposed to the machinations of obedient and experienced operatives who are very familiar with the intricacies involved in the art of reducing rock-solid complaints to screeds of mushy ambiguity.

This system (similar to the one deployed by the Faculty of Advocates), almost invariably secures the Law Society’s favourite outcome: the total exoneration of all the solicitors whose flair for appalling misconduct prompted the original complaints.

The president of the Law Society also informed us that the “listening, talking, advocacy and empathy at which our profession has long excelled, is something which our members new and old can be truly proud”.

A better example of the power of delusional thinking would be hard, very hard to find – even within a legal profession notoriously prone to believing that it alone is the perfect mechanism for facilitating access to justice.

THOMAS CROOKS Dundas Street, Edinburgh