Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

I move amendment No. 29:

In page 42, between lines 16 and 17, to insert the following:

62.—Section 30 of the Civil Legal Aid Act 1995 is amended—

(a) by inserting the following after subsection (6):

"(6A) Where the Board has granted a person a legal aid certificate for proceedings in any court or before any tribunal prescribed by the Minister under section 27(2), then, notwithstanding any enactment (including any provision of this Act), any statutory instrument made under any enactment, or any rule of law, the proceedings shall be issued in—

(a) the name of the law centre concerned where the law centre is responsible for providing the legal aid concerned,

(b) in any other case, the name of the solicitor or firm of solicitors responsible for providing the legal aid concerned.",

and

(b) in subsection (7), by substituting "shall" for "may".

This is a substantive amendment and will allow the Legal Aid Board to issue proceedings in the name of the law centre rather than, as at present, in the name of the individual solicitor who has seisin of the case. Administratively, this change will bring the law centres into line with private practices and ease the workload within the law centres as the professional staff will not necessarily have to see and sign all legal documents and it will not be necessary to file notices of change of solicitor with the courts when a solicitor leaves a law centre and is replaced by another.

The current practice is that each solicitor in a law centre practises as a sole solicitor. In a partnership of solicitors, the name of the partnership can be affixed to court documents and all the solicitors in that firm can have authority to transact business for each other. That principle hitherto did not apply to the law centres. The purpose of this section is to empower law centres to conduct their business in the same way as a practice with a number of partners.

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