Legal costs

Yet another report (13 August) highlights the stark contrast between the legal systems in England and Scotland. In the former, innovations like the acceptance of McKenzie friends (to assist party litigants in court), direct access to barristers (rather than through a solicitor) and class 
actions (which enable those who have suffered damage from the same party to sue collectively) are now available to the laity in England.

So far, after fierce resistance from the legal fraternity, only the grudging acceptance of McKenzie friends has modified Scotland’s legal landscape.

Direct access to advocates (and therefore lower legal costs) is vetoed by the Faculty of Advocates. Class actions were recommended by the Scottish Law Commission in 1996 and by the Gill Review in 2009 but they are far from being implemented.

Hostility to change and a peculiar, couthy inertia seem to coalesce when the legal establishment is confronted with the opportunity to improve access to justice – thereby ensuring that in Scotland, the journey from here to modernity is agonisingly hesitant, slothfully slow and therefore, for the laity, very expensive.

Thomas Crooks

Dundas Street

Edinburgh