Survey of solicitors raises prospect of ‘legal deserts’ as pressures mount on small firms
The number of solicitors has grown from 4,500 25 years ago to 12,000 and the growing demand for solicitors and growing interest in the career is evident by the society now having almost 1,600 trainees in its system, the highest ever, he says.
Forty-one per cent had some level of optimism about the profession’s future, 29 per cent veered towards pessimism and 31 per cent were neutral. Most – some 82 per cent – of the 2022 intake of trainees were attached to Dublin-based organisations/firms and almost 90 per cent were in Dublin and Cork, he notes.
Conveyancing, litigation, civil litigation/personal injuries, probate and commercial were the top five areas of practise of respondents. Of those, all but commercial were higher among sole practitioners/partners and lower among in-house solicitors in the private sector. Two out of three respondents want significant reform in digitalisation of the legal sector and almost half want specialist courts for intellectual property, family law and planning law.
The Ireland for Law initiative promotes Ireland internationally as a common-law jurisdiction with a robust justice system and the commercial court is a “significant success” and “first-class” element of our justice system, he says. The survey shows a “huge appetite” for modernisation of the courts system through digitalisation, types of sittings, specialisation of the courts and other reforms, Garrett notes.
The society has had wellbeing programmes and support services in place for some five years for trainees whose feedback has encouraged the society to broaden that out as a service to the profession in general, he outlines.
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