LIFE IN the legal world is not all riches. The reality for young lawyers is often one of living on an income a fraction the size of the average industrial wage.
One recently qualified barrister, who spent five years studying and more than €25,000 in tuition fees, had a total income last year (his third as a sole practitioner) of €8,000.
In order to pursue his legal career, he left a job where he had been earning a salary of €30,000.
“I wanted something I could make a career out of and that is why I went into law.
“I never went into it to be making the big bucks, I just wanted to be able to pay the bills,” he says. He recently applied for a job as a legal assistant, paying €23,000, and says he would “jump at it if I were to get it”.
“My wife [a primary school teacher] is basically the main breadwinner in our house, even though I am now four years qualified as a barrister. We are definitely having trouble making ends meet, but we can pay our rent.”
A barrister cannot advertise for clients, but relies on solicitors to send them cases on which they need specific legal expertise. Strictly independent, barristers therefore have to rely on contacts made during their apprenticeship years to obtain work.
“A lot of the time it comes down to family connections and whether you know solicitors personally to send you the work,” the struggling barrister adds.
As they are forbidden from handling a client’s money, barristers also rely on solicitors to send them fees due from paying customers. One of the main problems for young barristers is that there is no money in the economy. We take our instructions through solicitors and a lot of the solicitors are in dire straits themselves and literally, the money is not filtering down to the barrister at the end of the food chain.”
Another gripe among newly qualified barristers is the lack of fair competition. In 2006, the Competition Authority found the legal profession had many unnecessary restrictions on competition.
“I’m not sure there is any element of competition in there the way there should be. I still think it is a very closed shop.
“A lot of the senior counsels still earn astronomical fees while junior barristers struggle and an awful lot of us end up leaving the career early because there simply isn’t the volume of work around for us to do.”
With a Legal Services Bill expected from the Government, there will be changes in how lawyers work in Ireland.
Now committed to pursuing a legal career, this barrister is hoping for very specific changes to the current restrictions.
“A barrister can’t take a job for a large firm and then go to court. If they were to fuse the two professions or allow barristers to be employed, that would be a huge benefit for me.”
The counter-argument to such a proposal is that barristers need to be kept independent and impartial, as their first duty is to the administration of justice.
“I wouldn’t see any problem with a barrister being an employee of a firm and still being an honest practitioner and not misleading the court. I don’t think that being employed by another firm would necessarily put us in a position where we would end up lying to courts,” he says.
It would be an improvement on the current system, he argues, which he maintains presents a “serious barrier to entry for people from working-class backgrounds. If your family have wealth, you will always be able to make it through the six or seven years until you can start making money.
“Inevitably I see people from working-class backgrounds who have maybe been able to get loans to do the studies – that line of credit is dried up and they have nothing to live on.”