EUROPE : A CALL FOR ACTION
by Mark Kober-Smith
Europe is open for business – or will be soon,
with your help !
I am going to ask you, the reader, to do some work. I hope
to persuade you that you should get your email working, and
make your own contribution to the European debate.
Specifically, I want to persuade you to write (as briefly
as you like) to the European Commission, and the D.T.I., to
ask them to end the barriers that stop us working in
Europe.
Beginning
To begin with the beginning, as I think is recommended in a
popular classic, I suggest that our profession, as
notaries, can be and will be one which allows us to work,
wherever we choose, in Europe.
There are those who argue that Continental notaries are a
breed apart, intellectual racehorses, fleet of brain and
sinew. By implication, your English or Welsh notary is a
workaday beast, confined to merely ensuring the due
execution of deeds and documents drawn up by our more
gifted brethren.
I do not deny that our Continental colleagues are often
very skilled indeed. But though modesty is one of those
very British virtues, it can be pushed too far.
It seems better to start from the fact that we are all,
both here and on the continent, skilled and qualified
lawyers. In both systems, you end up with a mix of academic
and practical training, and usually do not become the
finished article, a fully fledged notary, until some seven
or eight years after you read your first law case. Count
the years you have spent qualifying as a solicitor and as a
notary, and I think you will see that this is right.
The
challenges – Language and law
That being the case, and having briskly narrowed the
supposed gap between Continental notaries and ourselves,
there remain two other barriers. One is language, the other
legal knowledge. How can we work abroad if we do not
understand the language or the legal culture?
Firstly of course, there is a way of sidestepping this
particular problem.
Our professional rules allow fee sharing with other
notaries. There is no reason why those of us who want to
work abroad could not open up an English and international
law department in partnership with an already established
notary firm in the country in question, (to assist English
speaking clients, UK and USA citizens, South Africans,
Canadians and others) and share profits with our notary
colleagues fully qualified already in France, Italy, etc.
Millions of our fellow citizens and fellow English speakers
are buying abroad, and they need our help.
However, assuming we are going for good, and setting up
shop abroad (and as good Europeans, we want to integrate) -
let us look at language skills first. Whether we like it or
not, those other nations out there are as attached to their
language, and as comfortable in it, as we are with ours.
But the difficulty of learning languages can be
exaggerated. In practice, (as those who actually work in
other countries attest), you learn a language when you want
and need to learn it. If there is no point in learning it,
you never do. When you are there, and need to learn, you
do.
At present it is true that not all of us are by any means
bilingual. But the same is true of other lawyers, and we
start with the advantage that, in international
transactions, English is very usually the lingua franca
that will be used when, say, a French lawyer talks to a
German one, or an Italian lawyer talks to a Polish lawyer.
Those cases, and those files, can be very attractive ones,
and there is no reason why we should not have them. If a
French lawyer can use English when talking with a German
one, why cannot an English lawyer do the same?
Similar considerations apply to legal knowledge. I think it
vital that we come to understand other legal systems
better, but we do not necessarily, and in the first
instance, have to set out to become dually qualified. We
can practise under home title, as English and international
notaries, gaining, as time passes, more and more knowledge
of our new country’s systems. We will become better
lawyers, more able to understand the complexities, the
problems, and the vast opportunities, that are opening up
every day in Europe.
The
rewards
There are many arguments for suggesting that working abroad
can be a good thing in itself, but it is interesting to
note the huge increase in prestige, and financial return,
which comes to those Continental lawyers who become
notaries rather than say avocats/solicitors.
On the Continent, it is fair to say that the notary is king
of the legal professions. He or (more rarely) she, is
generally near or at the top of all professions.
I find it easiest to obtain French figures, so I will focus
on those. There are actually reasons to think that these
figures underestimate the amount earned by French notaries.
In addition, the monopoly enjoyed by French notaries does
not cover as many activities as that of other EU states, so
potentially even bigger pickings await in other countries.
In L’Expansion, a French business magazine, (June
2005 edition) there is a comparative chart showing the
earnings of all the key professions in France. Notaries are
second from the top, earning a net average 187,100 euros a
year (after deducting taxes and costs, social charges etc).
French avocats, using the same method, earn an average of
44,600 euros. I am not a great mathematician, but the
figures leap from the page.
The figures earned by the top notaries, doing international
work in the cities, are very much more than this.
Of course, to English lawyers, used to at least hearing of
the telephone number salaries of City lawyers, these
figures are not shockingly high. But they do indicate
relative status, and French costs of living tend to be
rather lower than ours, to reflect the salaries earned by
the majority of consumers.
What is at stake
We have the opportunity to break the current monopoly
enjoyed by Continental notaries and set up either in
competition or collaboration with them. Many of us may not
take up these opportunities either now, or at all. But
these will exist if we act, and may not if we do not act.
The groundwork has already been done. It is clear EU law
that freedom of movement is a basic freedom, a right which
should never be infringed save in the most clear-cut cases
of national interest. The European Commission has
specifically examined all the arguments of Continental
notaries for denying free movement and rejected them.
All we need now is to convince the European Commission to
act, to sue the infringing states, launching the Court of
Justice case which will finally break these barriers.
Manuel Martin, Mr Pinto, and other English notaries have
shown that notaries can competently do substantive legal
work in other jurisdictions. The legal case, I suggest, is
overwhelming.
What we need now is action. Please do any one or all of the
following: (and remember, please, that a one line request
is fine)
(a) Ask the Notaries' Society to write to the European
Commission to support free movement of notaries and to
oppose Spain’s blocking of the acts of English
notaries. You can do this by emailing here:
secretary@thenotariessociety.org.uk
(b) Support the requests Manuel Martín and myself have made
to the Department of Trade and Industry here to ask the
Commission to sue infringing states and break down the
barriers to free movement and oppose Spain’s actions.
This section of the DTI specialises in acting to break down
barriers to trade.You can do this by emailing here:
(c) Email the Commission, asking it to act against these
barriers and unfair practices. The relevant person is Mr
Visée, an EU public servant in the Internal Market DG, who
understands English perfectly, is in charge of the file and
whose email is here:
(d) Write to your MEP, who you can find by looking at the
European website. There are several of these for each
geographical area, and you can take your pick of writing to
any or all of the relevant ones for your area. Writing to
your MEP is very useful. They are very keen, usually, to
make themselves useful, particularly on red hot current
matters such as this. They can also put pressure on the
relevant Commissioner (this being Mr Charlie McCreevy,
Commissioner for the Internal Market, in our case) The
website link for your MEP is here:
www.europarl.org.uk/uk_meps/MembersMain.htm
Conclusion
I am convinced we will eventually win, but we will win a
lot faster with your help. Your emails are vital in getting
things moving, and a swift punchy one will do. If you have
more time, feel free to write more, but it is not
essential.
Thank you for your time in reading this and thank you in
advance for acting on it !
If you have any points at all, or any questions,
suggestions, additions, or revisions, please do not
hesitate to email me on:
notary@notarypublicinlondon.com
Or call me on 020 7499 2605.
Yours,
Mark Kober-Smith