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Law set to cut legal fees

Peter Morley, The Courier Mail, 16 November 1992

Legal fees worth millions of dollars would be saved when Queensland's Freedom of Information legislation came into force on Thursday, Brisbane lawyer Mr Peter Carter said yesterday.

He said many of the savings would be in Workers Compensation Board cases where information on injured workers was not usually available to the claimants.

The information could be obtained by court order, but this added between $1500 and $2000 to the plaintiff's costs.

The board's information would be available to plaintiffs and their lawyers through FOI>

"When you consider that every major personal injury action would normally involve at least one application for a court order, the total savings in legal costs will be in the millions very year," Mr Carter said.

This did not include savings in court overheads.

Mr Carter said government agencies which would have to comply with FOI hoarded a wealth of information which, when available to lawyers, would assist and shorten investigations required to assess the nature of clients' cases.

Some departments probably would be apprehensive of their new found exposure to the public gaze because of the culture of secrecy which had become so strong within the public service.

"One explanation is that it arises from a fear of breach of some imagined confidentiality of the information itself," Mr Carter said.

"But why shouldn't a road trauma victim be entitled to know the opinion and conclusions of police officers who investigate the accident?"

"Such personal information was previously restricted to accident statistics and historical information. Probably lawyers have contributed to this culture by advising caution at every turn."