Hire us, not consultants, barristers tell government
The Victorian Bar has called on the federal government to hire “individual experts” such as barristers, rather than large law and accounting firms, to overcome “issues of cost, accountability and risks of breaches of confidence and trust”.
The Bar, in a submission to the joint parliamentary inquiry into the big four accounting firms, also argued that multidisciplinary partnerships – which combine legal and non-legal services – present a gap in regulation that could be fixed by imposing legal professional discipline over some non-legal practices.
Barristers can do better work for less money, the Victorian Bar says. Peter Rae
The federal parliamentary inquiry, triggered by the PwC tax leaks scandal, is looking at how the big four accounting firms are structured, their governance and reporting obligations and how they are regulated. The Bar will appear before the inquiry early next month.
The Bar submitted that current government guidelines for the procurement of Commonwealth legal work were unfairly geared towards retaining large firms of solicitors.
The guidelines failed to recognise the cost-effectiveness, expertise and ethical benefit of retaining barristers and should be changed, it said.
Because of their strict ethical and professional duties, independence and expertise, barristers were “better aligned with the interests of government clients”, the submission said.
“The independent Bar allows [government clients] to obtain short-term counsel and assistance, without having to sign up to complex, ongoing engagements with large firms seeking to ‘up-sell’ services,” the Bar submitted.
“This may be contrasted to a large firm with a pyramid structure that sees partners as hunters for work which is then ‘farmed out’ to a
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