Last week Firm columnist Mike Dailly questioned the scale of the Law Society Council. This week, solicitor Angus Logan has similar searching questions on the transparency and accountability of the Society's committees and their minuting procedures.

Getting information out of Law Society of Scotland Committees (certainly from the two I am most interested - the Civil Justice Committee and the Access to Justice Committee) seems to be a labour of Hercules, if not quite the proverbial dental extraction.

Ruling the Society by delegation to committees may have certain organisational advantages but it has few democratic ones. These committees must be subject to scrutiny by the Society’s Council and by the wider membership.



The website of the Law Society promises that Minutes will be available online but in the case of the Access to Justice Committee, no minutes have been made available for a year or more since October 2010.

This re-constituted committee is believed to have met in October 2011 but no minutes are yet available.

Why not ?

After several repeated requests by me to the Law Society, copies of some recent Civil Justice Minutes and a copy of the last Access to Justice Minutes from the said October of last year have at last reached me, courtesy of Mr Kevin Lang their Communications director.

Mr Lang says they are not published automatically (he ought to read the Lawsoc web site) but can be made available on request.

Yet I ask why the Minutes in this day and age cannot be approved and posted for all Society members to read within days?

Far too often, Committees are in a position to fire away letters to outside agencies or Government Ministers without the wider membership seeing any Minute describing the decisions made and the reasons behind the committee’s course of action . Confidentiality of a small number of discussions may well apply but in general terms, there seems to me to be no real justification for the Law Society Committees not being able to post Minutes of their deliberations online within days of meeting.

The Society’s committees are not themselves democratically constituted, whereas the Council of the Law Society is supposed to be so. Some of the composition of Committees is arguably already too limited and sectional for the Council to allow Committees to issue viewpoints eg to Government consultations which the wider membership has not had the opportunity to read about in advance.

An easy way to achieve membership scrutiny would be to publish prompt and online Committee minutes and to do so regularly and as of rule. In the e-age, in the quick response world in which we live, it is time that the Law Society and its committee convenors realised this and acted accordingly.

This is the Law Society in 2011 that we are discussing not a 1960s police convention in the USSR.

Angus Logan is a P.I. Accredited specialist at MacBeth Currie, Edinburgh