By James Boxell
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) looks set to use its new rules governing the international accountancy sector as a blueprint for liberalising all the professional services – including the legal profession.
The move could dramatically ease restrictions on rights of international lawyers to practice law across the globe. But it will meet with resistance from many local law societies that are keen to protect their right to regulate their domestic professions.
The WTO regulations for accountancy were finally introduced in December after four years of talks. The new rules were devised to stop the domestic regulation of the profession being used as a barrier to foreign competition.
It had been widely expected that the WTO would move on to look at the similar problems facing the legal profession after it had dealt with the accountants.
But at this month's meeting of the WTO working party on professional services, the first since the adoption of the accountancy regulations, several members said the best way forward would be to treat professional services as a whole rather than dealing with each sector individually.
The WTO would then use the new accountancy regulations as the model for all the professions.
Ben Greer, the IBA member who liaises with the WTO, has said the legal profession would object to any move to treat all the professions as one.
"At the IBA level, we would argue that the legal profession should not be treated in the same way as the other professions." He said that there were special considerations about the place lawyers held within society and that their ethical role had to be treated quite separately.
A WTO spokesman in Geneva confirmed that the working party on professional services had met to discuss "what to tackle next" and said that several members were considering treating the professions "horizontally" and taking "accountancy as a guideline". However, he said no final decision had been made and no future dates had been fixed for further meetings.
The spokesman also pointed out that the rules governing the accountants were not yet legally binding. He said that it was unlikely that they would become law until after the next round of WTO negotiations on professional services in 2000. He said it might be at this stage that moves would be made to include other disciplines within the legal framework, such as lawyers.
The spokesman also confirmed that if the rules were made legally binding, and included the legal profession, they could be used by lawyers who are currently denied the chance to practice freely in WTO member nations.
Under the regulations, lawyers would be able to lobby their law society and government to take their grievance to a WTO tribunal in Geneva. They would be able to argue that any such restrictions would be a restraint of trade.
l India has been notoriously difficult on foreign lawyers, while China has only given out restricted numbers of licences. Herbert Smith is hoping to pick up one of the highly sought after licences in the next month.