On November 7, EWMI/PROLoG hosted a meeting of the Legal Aid Service (LAS) Council and Georgian Bar Association (GBA) Ethics Commission to discuss the new LAS lawyer appraisal and review system with EWMI experts, professors Avrom Sherr and Alan Paterson. Experts advised the GBA and LAS representatives to consider the peer review process as evaluating whether a practitioner provides the minimum level of service that an average, reasonable lawyer would do while dealing with a client’s case. The experts also recommended legislative amendments to the Legal Aid Law which will make an assessment of the quality of a lawyer’s work an essential element of the work of all LAS attorneys. The experts further recommended that the Legal Aid Law be amended to require all LAS attorneys to submit selected cases for peer review assessment when asked, and to provide that LAS clients will, by accepting legal aid, consent to their legal cases being considered for quality assessment by another qualified lawyer, who will maintain the confidentiality of the client in the same way as the original lawyer.
Some significant agreements were reached at the meeting. The group agreed that a LAS lawyer providing a case file for review by a LAS reviewer would not violate the confidentiality requirement of the Ethics Code because the LAS is considered to be one office even though it has bureaus throughout the country. This was an important development, as the GBA Ethics Commission had previously issued an Advisory Opinion that it would be a violation of the confidentiality principle for a lawyer to transfer a case file to a reviewer for the evaluation of the lawyer’s performance. The group further agreed that providing cases for review also does not violate the independence of a lawyer, and that quality monitoring is necessary to ensure that the high quality legal services are provided to the socially vulnerable population by LAS lawyers.
The LAS promised to send the GBA Ethics Commission a detailed explanation of the evaluation criteria and the guiding document for reviewers, which will help the Commission to better understand the review system and make appropriate changes to its advisory opinion.