They should know that there are other lawyers who would conduct the case for them at the scale fee, and who those lawyers are, before they agree to engage a solicitor on some other basis. When I proposed such a scale of fees in a paper which I gave at the New South Wales Legal Convention in 1996 the then President of the Law Council of Australia told me that he agreed with my proposal. I invited him to adopt it and offered to surrender full credit for the proposal to the Law Council of Australia if they adopted it. I did not hear anything further. No doubt it is still being considered.
Governments appear as reluctant as lawyers to implement any such proposal.
I can only infer that the lawyers' lobby is very strong. But in the meantime that class of litigants who can least afford legal fees are suffering most. Changing the mindset of lawyers and judges I turn now to the fourth object, that of changing existing mindsets of lawyers and judges which has also progressed little. Two of the most pervasive and strongly held beliefs of lawyers is that our traditional system delivers near perfect justice and that an essential element of that is the adversarial system as we know it. Even a superficial knowledge of other systems such as the French or German systems should at least cause us to wonder whether ours delivers more perfect justice than theirs.