Tearing down the legal language barriers

Date: 31/10/1996

By Simon Coss

IF the European single market ever functions as intended, Laurent Marlière could well be out of a job.

He is general secretary of Eurojuris, an EU-wide network of more than 700 legal practices which helps clients navigate the minefield of differing national judicial systems currently operating within the Union.

“If mutual recognition of legal qualifications ever comes about, it could have an effect on our organisation. But I will have grey hair before that happens,” says Marlière.

With the advent of the internal market came an explosion in demand for cross-border legal services as EU businesses began setting up shop in other member states.

Almost immediately, entrepreneurs started running into problems as they became entangled in complicated and unfamiliar legislative systems.

Eight years ago, Belgian lawyer Etienne Duviesart spotted a lucrative gap in the internal market and Eurojuris was born.

The organisation started life as a network of law firms from Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg who agreed to work to certain basic standards and refer clients to each other when necessary.

The idea snowballed and Eurojuris now operates in all 15 EU member states as well as Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein.

In addition, the organisation has contacts with lawyers around the world.

The organisation believes in the maxim 'think global, act local', arguing that on-the-spot lawyers will generally be the best qualified to deal with local problems.

“There was a sort of monopoly of law firms in all member states based around the state capitals. If you have a problem for instance in Avignon, it is a nonsense to hire a Paris-based lawyer to deal with it. In the sorts of cases we handle, the personal touch and local expertise are crucial,” says Marlière.

To this end, Eurojuris has registered affiliates operating in more than 600 European towns and cities. The majority of the network's clients are either small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) or private citizens.

Through its decentralised system, the organisation is able to help smaller clients win cases with which large multinational legal conglomerates simply cannot be bothered.

“The big international law firms will have an office in each national capital and work through their own employees. In addition, they really have their sights set on big-business clients. This means their fees are often far too high for smaller customers. In Spain, for example, some small businesses were advised to give up chasing bad debts as the legal costs would amount to more than the money recovered,” says Marlière.

Because Eurojuris has contacts with local lawyers who deal with these sorts of problems on a daily basis, legal actions such as pursuing unpaid debts - a vital necessity for many SMEs - become possible.

The problems facing companies trying to operate in areas governed by a patchwork of national laws are, ironically, underlined by the difficulty Eurojuris has in publicising its own services on a pan-European basis. Since some member states have far stricter laws governing the advertising of legal services than others, Eurojuris must in some cases rely on word of mouth.

“In some countries, such as the UK and Holland, the rules governing publicity for legal services are fairly flexible. However, in states like Belgium or France, they are very strict,” explains Marlière.

The mutual recognition of lawyers' qualifications has long been a subject of intense debate within the EU. Although some progress has been made, full acceptance by member states of lawyers' training in other EU countries remains a thorny issue.

Given its role as a pan-European organisation, Eurojuris would seem ideally placed to lobby for increased harmonisation and the simplification of the Union's differing legal systems.

But, perhaps not surprisingly, Eurojuris does not seem to be pushing particularly hard for reform.

Cynics might suggest that this is because the confusion resulting from differing labyrinthine and archaic legal set-ups in the 15 member states is, after all, the organisation's life blood, and campaigning to change things would amount to killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

But Marlière deftly passes the buck on this issue by insisting this is not the organisation's job.

“Our task is to cope with national regulations and the legal professions across the EU are all very corporatist. Professional bodies within the member states are really the people who should be looking to change things,” he insists.