The DTI Likierman Report in 1988 concluded that there was a higher incidence of negligence actions being commenced against professionals. Ironically it noted that the rising number of claims was coupled with a general rise in the standards of professional competence. The report deduced that the cause of the increase was thus an increased willingness on the part of dissatisfied clients to commence legal proceedings. Recent trends seem to suggest that the volume of claims alleging negligence increases in times of recession, and lawyers, experiencing a surge of claims against them, have certainly been no exception. As the importance of services within developed economies grows, lawyers have not only benefited from increasing litigation for “defective” services and products: they have also become targets.

The book examines the law in several major jurisdictions, 14 in all, covering the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland and much of the European Union, including England and Wales, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Greece and Sweden. (Australia is not covered.) Each chapter is written by a specialist practitioner in the particular country; some of them specialize in professional liability and related fields and some practise in other areas. To provide some consistency, each jurisdiction covered analyses the current professional, civil, administrative and criminal rules applicable to the practice of law. These include those relating to the conduct of litigation, general and specialist advice, conflicts of interest, confidentiality, the applicable standards of professional performance and the compensatory remedies which are available for their breach. The book further examines the liability cover required of, and available to, legal practitioners as well as issues of transnational practice. The preface states that the book is directed particularly towards lawyers practising outside their home jurisdiction, and the aim of the book is to convey an understanding of the risks involved in doing so. While a firm is likely to instruct foreign lawyers in the particular jurisdiction(s), it will usually want to supervise them to some extent, and this book may help them to do so.

Professional negligence texts usually cover claims against a range of different professionals. Those that specialize in the liabilities of lawyers rarely contain much comparative material, and indeed this reviewer was unable to find another such comparative text currently in print. In such a multi-jurisdictional volume, each chapter must necessarily be brief, so one cannot expect too much detail. A contrasting difficulty is that some of the material is inevitably repetitive, especially many of the rules on professional conduct in some of the civil law jurisdictions, particularly those which have strong geographical or historical links with one another. The preface suggests that there are problems and indeed conflicts between the laws of various jurisdictions but makes no attempt to offer any solutions. It is left to the reader to work out what the differences are, but the fairly uniform coverage generally enables this to be done fairly easily. Sadly, little mention is made of the policy considerations which are inevitably involved in these cases.

The chapter on England and Wales covers the whole of lawyers’ liability in 28 pages. However, the chapter does manage to cover the very wide-ranging brief succinctly, and to the author’s credit cites the law of other jurisdictions where there is no English authority. It is both well-structured and well laid out, and easy to read. Interestingly, the section on General Advice notes that there may be a conflict between the Barristers’ Code of Conduct and the Code of Conduct for the European Community. The Bar’s Code states: “A barrister acts only on the instructions of a professional client and does not carry out any work by way of the … general conduct of a lay clients’ affairs nor the …