A Research On The Issue Of Lawyers’ Referral Fees

The phenomenon of lawyers’ case referral fee and a series of accompanying problems is one of the most obvious but unsolved problems in lawyers and judicial administrative organs.Under the background of the legal prohibition,few people carry out this reality of universal illegal,which is the reason why the study of the lawyer’s introduction fee or the lawyer’s fee distribution rule is blank.But avoidance does not solve the problem;it may even increase its harm,for nothing undermines the majesty of law more than the fact that it is disregarded.According to the author’s investigation,the current legal stipulation that lawyers "shall not pay referral fees" originates from a specific legislative purpose and social background.Its legislative purpose is to maintain order in the legal profession;Its social background is in the state law firm,cooperative law firm,partnership law firm and other legal services with the nature of lawyers but not the identity of lawyers in the chaotic situation.The reason why laws born in a particular historical background are not universally observed today is both simple and profound.Although it has broken away from the special environment in the early stage of the reform of the lawyer system,the phenomenon of lawyer referral fee still has the tendency to harm the economic interests of the parties,which is intolerable in today’s legal profession.In addition,the behavior of lawyers’ payment of referral fee breaks the two-way relationship based on trust between parties and lawyers to some extent,so that lawyers need to serve the third party in the same case to some extent.However,the indirect conflict of interest caused by this situation is definitely not a simple problem that can be solved simply by banning lawyers’payment of referral fee.Because the referral fee includes the lawyer’s most basic survival needs,namely the need for the source of cases.On the other hand,in the case of the commercial trend sweeping the legal industry and the legal system operating according to the business model,the existence of the lawyer referral fee has also improved the overall efficiency of the legal industry,and even improved the quality of legal services provided to the parties or clients under certain conditions.Finally,on the basis of learning from foreign governance experience,the author suggests to cancel the current prohibitive provisions and take the lawyers who implement the introduction behavior as the regulation object of the introduction fee rule,impose the corresponding legal obligations at the same time,and give the parties the rights corresponding to the obligations.Only by reasonably setting up rights and obligations can we achieve the balance of interests on the whole.