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2.
to encourage sufficient locally-born lawyers to enter the public service, not just at the lowest level, so as to ensure in the legal field Government is sufficiently aware of local aspirations, traditions and considerations and so that the legal service (including the Judiciary) is not so overwhelmingly expatriate.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The Attorney General's Chambers
To meet these aims and to prevent the dangerous break- down in legal services foreshadowed above, I would like to see the structure, terms and conditions of service and pay of my Chambers altered in the following fashion:
(a)
the broadly-based pyramidical structure of Chambers be changed by increasing the proportion of APCC and SCC. This would allow
(i)
sufficient posts to provide a career structure for the very necessary workhorses, whilst
(ii) permitting the accelerated promotion and hence
retention of some of the young but very able Crown Counsel recently recruited from whom eventually the highest posts must be filled, and
(iii) at the same time allowing the recruitment
from the private sector possibly in Hong Kong and certainly from elsewhere of a few older and more experienced lawyers of good ability who are necessary (bearing in mind erosion into the Judiciary) if in the short to medium term
there are to be enough people capable of becoming Law Officers and their Deputies.
(b) The salary level of APCC (DJL1: $11,810) is too
close to SCC (top $11,200) and too far below PCC (DJL3 : $16,200). It should be increased to the level of DJL2 ($14,090) – assuming the present scales remained unchanged. APCC would then become (assuming (a) above were implimented) the level at which the majority of difficult or complex work requiring special expertise was done, leaving only the most difficult for PCC. I attach as Appendix B a diagram of the Chambers structure I would like to see brought into operation. The effect (on the basis of the 1980-81 establishment of Chambers) would be, whilst not increasing the total numbers employed, to raise the number of APCC from 15 to