Judicial Commission

The Judicial Commission of New South Wales is a statutory corporation that provides continuing education to and examines complaints made against judicial officers in New South Wales, a State of Australia. The commission is headed by the Chief Justice of New South Wales and consists of the heads of each of the major courts in New South Wales plus community representatives. The commission is the only body of its type in Australia. Similar bodies are in existence in Canada, India and the United States. The work of the commission is split into two distinct areas. The first is a conduct division which deals with complaints about judicial officers. The other area is the educative function, which provides information on sentencing information, legal development and ongoing training for judicial officers. The commission marked a significant change in the legal system in New South Wales. It restored public confidence in the judicial system which had been rocked by a serious of scandals and allegations of misconduct in the early 1980s. The commission eliminated the political process from the removal of a judge from public office. Judges were no longer subject to the whim of the government of the day in whether they could be removed from office. Instead, the commission now provides a means outside of politics for the dispassionate consideration of misconduct by judicial officers. As one present judge has suggested, the commission has actually improved and safe-guarded independence of the courts. The model for a judicial commission has received support for introduction elsewhere in Australia.

Practice of Law

In its most general sense, the practice of law involves giving legal advice to clients, drafting legal documents for clients, and representing clients in legal negotiations and court proceedings such as lawsuits, and is applied to the professional services of a lawyer or attorney at law, barrister, solicitor, or civil law notary. However, there is a substantial amount of overlap between the practice of law and various other professions where clients are represented by agents. These professions include real estate, banking, accounting, and insurance. Moreover, a growing number of legal document assistants LDAs are offering services which have traditionally been offered only by lawyers and their employee paralegals. Many documents may now be created by computer-assisted drafting libraries, where the clients are asked a series of questions posed by the software in order to construct the legal documents.

In the United States, the practice of law is conditioned upon admission to practice of law, and specifically admission to the bar of a particular state or other territorial jurisdiction. The American Bar Association and the American Law Institute are among the organizations that are concerned with the interests of lawyers as a profession and the promulgation of uniform standards of professionalism and ethics, but regulation of the practice of law is left to the individual states, and their definitions vary.

In the United States, the rules of professional conduct generally prohibit an attorney from assisting a non-attorney from engaging in the unauthorized practice of law. An attorney therefore may not partner with or split fees with a non-attorney in the performance of any sort of legal work. Furthermore, an attorney may not employ a disbarred or suspended attorney in a legal practice where former clients of the disbarred or suspended attorney will be represented.