Brooking Rachel; Salesa JennyRACHEL BROOKING (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker for the opportunity to talk on the Lawyers and Conveyancers (Employed Lawyers Providing Free Legal Services) Amendment Bill. I'd like to start my contribution by acknowledging Chris Bishop who's promoted the bill and by saying I think I'm impressed that he took a LawTalk article with him on summer holiday to Mexico. I've read many LawTalk articles over the years but never one in Mexico. I also want to commend Chris Bishop for wanting to act on the article he read in terms of improving access to justice. I think that's something that all speakers in the House today talked about as being a very important objective.It is interesting and relevant to this to think first of how lawyers are regulated. Lawyers exist in many different forms. We have lawyers that are in firms and they will have a partnership or a directorship model and there'll be many different layers of lawyers and other staff beneath them. Those firms are very well insured. If it's a bigger firm they'll have many different people employed to think about risk training for junior solicitors to bring them up and there's a lot of support around people in a firm. Then you also have barristers and these are people who are court advocates normally or they might be specialists who write clever opinions on a specialist topic. They work by themselves so they are regulated in quite a different way from the firms and they generally need instructions from a law firm before they can be engaged. Then you have the in-house lawyers and these lawyers are what this bill applies to. We heard from one of the previous speakers that in-house lawyers might be in Government departments. They might be in councils. They might in universities. They might be in agricultural companies. They might be in electricity companies. There is a whole host of in-house lawyers and we've heard that there are 8000 of them now. Those lawyers are working in quite a different environment from lawyers in a firm. Depending on how big the in-house team is that lawyer might just be working by themselves and have no other lawyers that they engage with unless they're talking to a law firm or a barrister. In some circumstances they're actually large teams of in-house lawyers so there is a big range of in-house lawyers. My point is that this bill applies to those in-house lawyers and not ones in firms.I was in fact an in-house lawyer of a sort. I had at least my practising certificate at the beginning of the millennium when I was working for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. After that I went into a law firm and stayed there with some maternity leave for almost two decades. So I have some experience with pro bono advice training up junior solicitors and also doing community law work. The mischief that this bill is trying to address is to enable in-house counsel to do this good work. Currently in the current legislation it is misconduct to give legal advice out of your employment if you are an in-house lawyer unless as my colleague Vanushi Walters has discussed in some detail you are providing that advice at a community law centre. I would say that this is something that many lawyers can take up. I used to attend community law centres and supervise some students there and I can say I've never really practised criminal law or family law which were the main issues coming before that community law centre.The bill is very simple really. Clause 6 of the bill inserts a new section into the Lawyers and Conveyances Act. Clause 6 New section 10A inserted (Lawyer providing legal services to person other than employer" states that "Nothing in this Act prevents a lawyer who is an employee from providing free legal services to a person other than his or her employer if the services are provided—(a) with the agreement of the employer; and (b) in accordance with practice rules made under section 94 by the New Zealand Law Society." So that's it. It's a very small bill but despite it being a very small bill it does raise some very big issues. The clue with that is this reference to section 94 which concerns the practice rules made by the New Zealand Law Society. That is because standards apply to lawyers giving advice. Why might they do this? Well if the lawyer gives bad advice then that might put someone on a terrible course of action that may cause them harm cause somebody else harm and may incur some liability. This is something that you think a lot about as a practising lawyer. There are many client care obligations for lawyers when they're dealing with a paying client and also if you're in a firm giving pro bono advice those same rules apply.There is a large burden on firms. They take the giving of pro bono advice very seriously. There's been some movement since I started as a lawyer in that firms really want to show to the community that they are doing pro bono work and now they often have a senior partner who decides what the best pro bono work is for that skillset of lawyers to be undertaking and how they can get the most benefit for society from giving their free advice. As I mentioned though they still need to insured. Solicitors who aren't partners or who can't practise on their own account still require supervision and there is a lot of process surrounding it.Therefore if in-house lawyers were to be able to do this pro bono work there would need to be some regulation around that to make sure the people who are getting the advice are getting good advice and particularly to make sure that those junior lawyers are protected from the consequences of giving bad advice. Alternatively—and this is what the select committee considered as well—rather than having additional regulation you could have a community law - type clearing house and this is Te Ara Ture which we've been hearing about and you could fund that so that in-house lawyers could have a special circuit to come in to give pro bono advice about their specialist areas and they'd provide security for some of those concerns that I've outlined. I'm not on the Justice Committee but from reading their report they spent a lot of time on the New Zealand Law Society submission particularly around the process question—what process would you put around those in-house lawyers who are wanting to do this good work? They noted on page 3 of their submission at paragraph 2.5 that that would be needed and at paragraph 2.6 that there would need to be additional resourcing to work out what this framework would be. They said then at 3.4 "A balance needs to be struck between having necessary protections in place to ensure that professional standards are met and not creating an overly heavy administrative burden for the Law Society and for employed lawyers (who are not approved to practise on their own account) wishing to undertake pro bono legal services." They go on at 3.5 to say that the Act and the rules do not currently differentiate between fee-paying and pro bono work. So that is the issue I raised before about why the law firms are so careful when their lawyers are undertaking pro bono work to make sure that those lawyers and the firm are protected from any liability.The Law Society submission goes on to say that "lawyers' professional and ethical obligations apply equally to both paid and pro bono legal services. Care needs to be taken to ensure that a legislative framework facilitating the provision of pro bono legal services does not undermine the existing regulatory framework governing the legal profession. This will ensure lawyers are able to meet their ethical and regulatory obligations and consumers receive the regulatory protections provided for under the Act and the Rules."So in conclusion there does need to be more work to improve access to justice. We've heard before that there has been a major increase to community law and that will continue under this Government I am sure and I oppose this bill. Thank you.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The next call is a split call. I call on the Hon Mark Mitchell."