Ms Isolde Goggin:

That is a very good point. From our point of view, when we are looking at competition in the market, it is not enough that there are many competitors in the market. I take the Deputy's point that there are many barristers and it is a very long-tail profession. There are a few superstars at the top who are making a lot of money and many people down at the end who are scratching around trying to make a living and finding it very hard to survive, particularly in the first few years.

The difficulty in competition comes down to the point I was making about information asymmetries. In many consumer transactions, there is an information asymmetry between the ordinary person who is going to court for the first time or whatever and the solicitor or barrister who understands how the case might evolve and the cost. Also, within the profession, there are many information asymmetries, even for professional buyers, the insurance industry and the State. If I am looking for somebody who has a competition specialism, how do I know who they are? It is very difficult. One tends to rely on word of mouth, and that exacerbates the problem.

In terms of the point Mr. Doherty was making about barristers being able to point out their areas of specialism on the barristers roll, that would give one a start. One would at least be able to say that apart from the big names that everybody has heard of, there are people who have litigated in this area about whom the solicitor one is using might not have heard but who could be brought into the mix. The idea of going to tender for that is a good one, once we have a base of knowledge of who does this kind of work, because some of it is quite specialised.

The other area we brought up in the report and on which I know the Legal Services Regulatory Authority is working is the one of barrister partnerships. If one is doing litigation frequently, one finds that the top barristers constantly double and triple-book themselves. It then comes to the date and they are in the Supreme Court so they cannot do the High Court or the Central Criminal Court and they give the case to somebody else. For us, the advantage of barrister partnerships from the consumer point of view is that they are a sort of guarantee of quality. I refer to an arrangement like chambers in the UK. If one is going to a certain chamber, that chamber is a mark of quality so one knows that if the case is being passed on to somebody, he or she will reach the same high quality of the person one originally wanted. We believe that more flexibility in the business models would make it easier for new people to get in, get a start and not be expected to make a living in the same way as the top people do through word of mouth but through being handed over work within a partnership or a firm. We believe being able to say, "Yes, I have an expertise in this area and put that on the roll", would help them a good deal as well.