The legal services market between Eu-driven liberalisation and continuing national restrictions

The chapter draws an up-to-date picture of the principles governing the regulation of the legal services market in the EU context. First, it examines the specificities of this market, which – to be sure – many stakeholders, from certain bar associations (not all of them), to various scholars, to many national legislators, continue to regard as not really such. However, this resistance to considering it as a market like any other contrasts with the constant and precise indications coming from the European institutions, in particular from the Commission and the Court of Justice of the EU. Very recently, the Court of Luxembourg reaffirmed again the unlawfulness of mandatory minimum fees imposed by professional associations, fully confirming a case-law that considers lawyers as businesses on a par with any other business in any other sector. However, this principle still encounters much opposition at the national level, so one must question the compatibility with Eu law of the restrictions that still exist in many legal systems, at the level of both legislative sources and ethical rules. The chapter focuses on some of these restrictions, which have been the subject of the most important cases of the CJEU, and mentions the main others, which have not yet been examined by the courts at the European level; it then expresses the hope that more and more national legislations, also as a result of the European Union drive, will proceed in the direction of opening up the legal services market, guaranteeing practitioners the possibility of operating with a regulatory framework that is appropriate to the profound challenges and transformations that the current technological evolution is bringing about.