SC asked to probe consultancy services of foreign lawyers
THE SUPREME Court has been asked by lawyers’ groups to investigate the proliferation of advertisements by foreign lawyers offering their services as visa consultants. The request was made by members of the Las Piñas City Bar Association (LPBA) and the Integrated Bar of the Philippines-Parañaque, Las Piñas (IBP-PPLM) chapter through Manuel Laserna Jr., LPBA founder and IBP-PPLM vice president. Laserna Jr. said Filipino lawyers were prohibited from engaging in any form of direct and indirect or private and public lawyer advertising as stated under the 1988 Code of Professional Responsibility and existing Legal Ethics-related jurisprudence. Yet, Laserna said, “Foreign lawyers who aggressively engage in the business of providing immigration and visa-related legal and semi-legal consultations and allied services to Filipinos here and abroad freely and openly place mass media advertisements, directly and publicly selling their legal, semi-legal and paralegal services to their Filipino markets.” In the process, Laserna said this has created the “discriminatory and scandalous impression that such foreign lawyers [some, if not most, of whom are of Filipino descent] were a privileged class of lawyers and are beyond the ambit, control, supervision, direction, and disciplinary powers of the Philippine Supreme Court in re: lawyer advertising violations." "I find the situation to be seriously and morally anomalous," said Laserna in his letter to Chief Justice Artemio Panganiban. He urged the high court to adopt an official stand and create an ad hoc committee to conduct an investigation. |
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