Article published in LEXBASE PROFESSION AVOCAT, January 9, 2020

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It would be an understatement to say that lawyers, magistrates, court clerks and other judicial staff are experiencing an acute crisis in their respective professional practices, and that this crisis is having repercussions on the relationships they have with each other.

We know the main causes: dematerialization of professional practices, lack of human and budgetary resources allocated to justice, application of the 2018-2022 programming and reform law for justice and the subsequent changes to our judicial and administrative procedures that are transforming the day-to-day professional practice of people in the justice system.

As far as Paris is concerned, the Tribunal's installation in a high-rise building designed by the Ministry of Justice and a private developer, without any real consultation with judges and lawyers at the design stage, has not failed to give rise to tensions and incidents.

The increasing number of incidents between members of the legal profession in Paris in 2019 led Marie-Aimée Peyron and Jean-Michel Hayat, when they were respectively President of the Paris Bar and President of the Paris Tribunal de Grande Instance, to organize the first conference on relations between lawyers, magistrates, court clerks and legal staff on November 14.

These conferences have opened up a forum for dialogue between members of the legal profession, which needs to be maintained and even promoted in all jurisdictions in France.

The Paris Assizes were organized in the form of ten workshops: civil hearings; criminal hearings; the faith of the Palais and professional secrecy; the court clerk's office and the lawyer; access to magistrates; social hearings; searches and investigative acts concerning lawyers; the public prosecutor's office and the day-to-day exercise of the rights of the defense; communication: ethics and social networks and relations with the media; 18 months on: court operations. The workshops were open to all lawyers, magistrates, court clerks and judicial staff at the Paris court. A summary of each workshop was presented to all participants at two plenary sessions.

The dialogue was frank, open and constructive. Points of view were confronted. Everyone was able to set out the difficulties they were encountering in their professional practice and, at the end of the debate, proposed solutions to resolve them were agreed. Of course, not everything has been resolved, and divergent positions remain. But it is undeniable that progress has been made and that this dialogue must continue.

It is now up to the Paris Bar Association, under the impetus of its new President, Olivier Cousi, and its new Vice-Bâtonnière, Nathalie Roret, to work with Stéphane Noël, President of the Paris Judicial Court, and Rémy Heitz, Paris Public Prosecutor, to implement the practical solutions proposed.

Each of them assured us that they would apply the solutions found together, and that they would preserve this space for dialogue between the people of the Paris Tribunal.

There is already constant communication between heads of courts and the president of the bar. But what these meetings have revealed is the absolute need to set up regular meetings between referral lawyers on the one hand, and magistrates in charge of departments and court clerks on the other, in order to try to resolve at this intermediate level the problems encountered by each of us, or to submit the difficulty that cannot be resolved at this stage to the heads of jurisdiction and the president of the bar.

In the end, we chose to follow Epictetus' teaching: if we can't act directly on what doesn't depend on us, let's first act on what does depend on us. And what depends on us is first and foremost the way we listen and talk to each other. While respecting our respective roles, procedural laws and the rights of the defence.

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