Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)
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I believe that there is a need for a time limit. The Bill already prescribes a three year time limit for making application to the legal costs adjudicator. Having paid a bill, there is a three year time limit within which one can make a complaint thereafter. It is important to have consistency in the legislation. Three years after someone has discovered there is a reason to complain is sufficient time, rather than five years, to allow for the making of complaints. However, we must also be careful. There are circumstances that can arise where an individual may not know that their legal issues have not been dealt with appropriately. Let us say, for example, that I go to a solicitor and buy a house. I pay my mortgage on that house and 15 years later I decide I want to sell it. I then discover, unknown to me, that the solicitor has the house registered in his or her own name. That is not very far away from certain difficulties we have recently seen. We cannot have a situation where someone could not, 15 years later upon discovering that, make a complaint. We are looking at how best to frame this. The cost complaints issue is very straightforward but for other complaints, there is a need to take care. I do not believe it is right to have an open-ended situation whereby 30 years or 50 years after someone has completed legal work for a client, that client can make a complaint. That is not reasonable either. I am aware of members of the legal profession who 20 or 30 years after they completed work for individuals have had complaints made against them that have proved to be spurious but the Law Society was in a position where it had to deal with those complaints in good faith. We must provide the appropriate balance to ensure that if someone who has no way of knowing that their affairs have not been dealt with appropriately makes such a discovery, he or she can make a complaint but that there is a prescribed time frame. We will come back to that issue on report stage.