Conditional fee arrangements (CFAs) have corrupted the legal profession and permitted a vast increase in lawyer-driven litigation, according to a book published tomorrow by think tank Civitas.
Increasing ‘access to justice’ has been used as a smokescreen to allow the exploitation of private disputes for financial gain, argues Civitas director David Green. He says both CFAs and damages-based agreements should be banned.
The proposal is contained in a book analysing the evolution of the judicial system in recent decades. In Democratic Civilisation or Judicial Supremacy?, Dr Green writes that CFAs and human rights legislation have transformed the legal profession. “Together, they have had a corrupting effect on the legal profession and have promoted the politicisation of the judiciary,” he says.
“For most of our history, conditional fees were illegal under common law and the strongest opponents were the lawyers themselves. Now that we have had CFAs for some years, we can see that the fears of earlier generations were understandable…
“For many years, to be free was to be able to go about your life without ever having to speak to a lawyer or go near a court from one year to the next. If you obeyed the law, costly encounters with lawyers and courts could easily be avoided. It is now widely accepted that these relaxations of the law have permitted a vast increase in lawyer-driven litigation.”
In the book, Dr Green urges “lawyers with a sense of vocation” to reassert themselves and reclaim the profession from those who have been lured by the prospects for financial gain offered by CFAs and the Human Rights Act and who, he says, have “captured” the Law Society and the Bar Council.