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should be retained (on the long salary scale) only for the purpose of staffing the office of Registrar-General, if created, and that they should eventually all be called Crown Solicitors. I assume that it is your proposal that functions at present per- formed by the Crown Solicitor should be transferred to the Attorney-General, the Registrar-General and their staffs.
If 80,
is there any necessity to retain the title "Crown Solicitor"? I refer to long term planning and agree, of course, that so long as Andrews holds the office of Crown Solicitor the title and status of the post should be maintained.
that
6. I wonder whether Hong Kong would like to consider a proposal which has been put forward here for the African territories new appointees to the Colonial Legal Service should be actually appointed "Legal Officers" in the first place and that the Government of the territory should then be free to post them as magistrates or Crown Counsel as they think. If this plan were adopted for Hong Kong and applied both to Solicitors and Barristers it would, no doubt, have to be recognised that a Solicitor would not be posted as Crown Counsel so long as the two professions continue to be separate in private practice.
7. I should like to emphasise the necessity, to which you refer, for giving Crown Counsel an opportunity to do some drafting. I entirely agree with you that it is by no means all legally qualified persons who can draft, or could ever learn to do so, and unless every man is given this chance, we have no opportunity of finding those who have the aptitude for the work which would make them eligible.for promotion as legal draftsmen. The number of posts of this kind is steadily increasing and we are watching officers' reports to pick out those who are really good at the job.
8.
As regards the Hong Kong legal draftsman, I see that you propose that be should be temporarily on the long (Crown Counsel) scale salary. If you can secure a satisfactory man on that basis so much the better, but in general I feel quite certain that colonies will not get competent mon to perform this highly specialised work which, even to the skilled draftsman, is not really very attractive, without a superscale salary. I am als0 not sure that a local appointment is really necessary. No doubt there would be an advantage in continuity, but could not the same be said of law officerships and other legal posts? So far as I know, the legal draftsmen who have been appointed on transfer have had no more difficulty in picking up the local law than bave law officers promoted from other territories.
9. If the legal draftsman has time to take on the revision of the laws there is, of course, no reason why he should not do it; quite the contrary. But retired members of the Colonial Legal Service have frequently been given this work and do not seem to have found any great difficulty, even if they previously had no knowledge of the law of the colony in question. Nor, when one considers the cost of the revision as a whole, does the remuneration seem to be a very serious item. In recent cases it has taken the form of an honorarium round about 1000 guineas.
10.
One final point of detail. You say (pages 13 and 14) that the only superscale posts which would, in practice, be treated as reserved for assistant Crown Solicitors would be that of Registrar- General. Even so, surely they would be likely men for pro- motion not only to the post of legal draftsman but also as Registrar of the Supreme Court. In any event is this a matter of much importance? So long as there is anything in the nature of the
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