Netherlands Breaks with Self-Regulation in Legal Profession

In the Netherlands, a break is being made with corporatist oversight in the legal profession:“Oversight of the legal profession is being reformed much more drastically than expected. A new, national supervisory authority will be established, largely led by individuals from outside the legal profession. The current supervisors, the local deans, will lose all of their responsibilities in this area.”

In other words: disciplinary oversight of lawyers will in the future be carried out by individuals who are not themselves part of the legal profession. The proposal includes safeguards to ensure that this does not become a disguised form of state control. This reform follows a series of scandals involving breaches of professional ethics by prominent lawyers.

By analogy, this would mean ending the current practice whereby disciplinary disputes are handled by bar presidents who are themselves lawyers — a system that can easily lead to situations where colleagues go easy on each other, or where widespread structural issues within the profession are not addressed due to a gradual erosion of ethical standards.

Could this serve as inspiration to take a serious look at how the legal profession — and its ethical oversight — functions in our own country?

Go to original article 'FD.nl'

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