CO129-603-7 Legal Department- reorganisation 18-2-1948 - 19-10-1949 — Page 39

chance, we have no opportunity of finding those

the

who have an aptitude for the work which would make

them eligible for promoti.on as legal draftsmen,

port of this kuns

The number of which is steadily increasing se aut

watching

that we are finding it necessary to watch officers'

reports to pick out those who are really good at

the job.

that

the

As regards/Hong Kong legal draftsman, I see that you propose he should be temporarily on the long(Crown Counsel) scale salary, If you can secure a satis-

factory man on that basis so much the better, but in general I feel quite certain that colonies will not

get competent men to perform the highly specialised

work which, even to the skilled draftaman, is not really very attractive without a superscale salary. I am also not quite sure that a local appointment is really necessary. No doubt there would be an ad-

vantage 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 have law officers promoted from other territories. 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 contraryr • But

retired members of the C.L.S. have frequently been

down” www

< han given this work and so far as I know have not 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, dors

seanthj

·

the remunerationдa 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

3