Auchinvole Chris: Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Auchinvole Chris: Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 July 2008. Volume:648;Page:17439. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHRIS AUCHINVOLE (National) 
: 
 The purpose clause of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill (No 2) states: “The purpose of this Act is to enable lawyers who are employed by employer organisations or unions to provide legal services to persons who are members of their respective employers.” This bill is needed in order to amend the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006 which is due to come into force on 1 August so some special speed is required.  
The Minister Annette King in introducing the bill during the first reading debate asked for a very short time frame and National members responded in their first reading speeches that they would support the legislation and the short time frame. The courtesy of early advice and request has been most encouraging. Speaking as a first-term MP I say that it is nice to find that this level of cooperation is on occasions transacted by the present Government. I guess I can think of other legislation where it would have been nice had that level of communication occurred. One of the reasons for this time frame is to provide assistance to the affected parties that are caught up in this new legislation through no fault of their own.  
I admit to having taken a moment or two when on the Justice and Electoral Committee to fully understand the ramifications of it all. My colleague Richard Worth said that the legislation being amended was highly technical and I concur with that. A number of the submitters we heard from were asking for the status quo to continue—the practice that Mr Chauvel referred to. From my understanding that was not really what they wanted. It was not in their best interests because the whole situation was about to change. They did not want the status quo to carry on; what they required was to be able to continue their previous practices. But under the new legislation they are expressly forbidden from doing that and even then they probably should not have been doing it anyway. The legislation does this by distinguishing between legal services required by the organisation—particularly advocacy and representation services—and those required by the organisation’s members.  
The intention of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006 included protecting confidence in the provision of legal services and conveyancing services and protecting consumers of those services. It could be said and has been said by submitters that the reason for this bill was that there was an unintended consequence of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006 which will be corrected by this amendment bill. The bill includes employer organisations and trade unions in the list of employers of in-house lawyers who are able to provide the regulated services.  
The nub of the matter is that the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006 has a general principle that lawyers must be employed by lawyer organisations if they are to provide legal services to the public. Members of unions and employer organisations are members of the public so a situation occurs where members of these organisations—such as the 42000 members of the Nurses Organisation—are suddenly deprived of the services they have enjoyed.  
Similarly Business New Zealand welcomed and supported this amendment bill which addresses a current anomaly preventing lawyers with practising certificates who are employed by employers’ organisations and unions from providing legal services to members of their organisations. The only way they can do so is to work without practising certificates and not refer to themselves as lawyers. That I would imagine would not be a particularly easy thing for a professional lawyer to swallow but I do not have an opinion on that.  
But should this bill not proceed the options would be for unions and employment organisations to use legal personnel without practising certificates or to provide current legal services through a separate firm set up for the purpose. To a non-lawyer like myself when one has the representatives from Business New Zealand the New Zealand Educational Institute and the New Zealand Nurses Organisation and letters from the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions all at the same table making harmonious submissions together it really is head-scratching stuff.  
Legal practice of course has intrinsic and intricate relationships protocols and a very long history of using precedents and when one starts to regulate a control in a particular direction it often cuts into a practice that has been exercised through convention not regulation. So by introducing regulation the strength of the convention is then open to question and doubt. This was my impression from listening to the New Zealand Law Society’s submission which related to the practice of lawyers being employed by non-lawyers to provide legal services to their employers but not to other employees. Their list of reasons for this includes the need to ensure that legal services are provided to members of the public by lawyers qualified to practise on their own account or under the direct supervision of a lawyer who is qualified the need for independent advice the protection of the Law Society’s rules of professional conduct and other regulations and the liabilities involved.  
To me the Law Society’s submission demonstrated that the position and practice that had previously occurred as a convention was condoned rather than having any formal recognition but now that the matter was under consideration then the old ways could no longer be adhered to—hence the problem. The Law Society’s submission was true to its profession in looking at everything every which way and it is indeed the task of that organisation to do that. As a non-lawyer though I was taken on a journey of labyrinthine proportions through the reasons concerns wise saws and instances of the sorts of problems that will be associated with introducing this amendment bill and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the society’s advice and argument. The solution offered was in line with the comments of the other organisations in relation to surrendering practising certificates and setting up separate legal firms or entities although the others had seen that as being disadvantageous and unwieldy. The Law Society saw the danger of precedence in any move to allow exceptions—as will occur with this amendment—and considered that it could lead to demand for exceptions for other categories of lawyers employed by non-lawyers such as those in major firms of accountants.  
One point made in all the submissions resonated particularly with me and that is to be seen when looking at the purpose of the bill. An earlier version of the bill stated that it was to enable lawyers who were employed by employer organisations and unions to provide legal services to persons who were members of their respective employers. I see now in this latest published edition that it allows them to “provide”; it does not say “enable” them. But the key word to me is that word “enable”. It does not compel and it opens an opportunity.  
If I were a lawyer I wonder how I would feel about having an obligation or a compulsion to provide whatever services employees wanted. I am not sure that I would want that. Then I found there were some 35 lawyers I think in this particular category. Those who spoke to the committee indicated that their pressure of work was such that they had scant opportunity to accept engagements of a personal nature from other employees. I myself would have thought that they would probably have a natural reluctance to make themselves too available anyway. I wonder whether the whole matter could be addressed by the simple addition of a phrase in the purpose of the bill specifying that such legal services apply to matters of employment only. That I would hope would overcome all the raised and perceived concerns expressed during the submission process. Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker.