The Law Society of Ireland which represents solicitors has said it is cracking down on client poaching by members of the profession.
Speaking to RTÉ's News at One, the Director General of the Law Society Ken Murphy said that a small minority of solicitors were breaching rules.
He said that some solicitors were approaching people unsolicited on the steps of courthouses and in some instances, within court rooms.
Mr Murphy said: 'We've been receiving complaints for some time now that individuals, often vulnerable people, approaching courthouses without a solicitor are being approached in contravention of rules about direct unsolicited approaches in the vicinity of courthouses, prisons and Garda stations'.
He said that while the behaviour of solicitors needed to be regulated, it was still difficult to detect instances of malpractice.
Mr Murphy said: "the difficulty is detecting the evidence for the society to act on this kind of thing, because often it would require the individual accused to come forward and they are naturally disinclined to do that."
Mr. Murphy said client poaching was a direct result of the current 'grim realities' of the legal profession with a collapse of work and a concurrent collapse in income for many solicitors.
In spite of this, Mr. Murphy said there was still a need to protect the public against all forms of client poaching.
A review group set up by the council of the society agreed unanimously that problems identified by ethical criminal law practitioners such as client poaching were genuine, current and real, and neither infrequent nor apocryphal.
