“Clients are not always rational or reasonable people,” he said.

“They are often emotionally very invested in their cases, to an unreasonable level where they don’t like to hear rational things,” he said.

Schedule

“Solicitors have to be conscious that we live, as barristers, in a very imperfectly scheduled system where it’s very difficult to have a definitive schedule.

"A barrister can have no work for three weeks, and five cases in the fourth week,” he said, and that might be the week a solicitor needs advice.

“Mutual respect is generally incompatible with a solicitor criticising a barrister in front of a client, or vice versa, with very rare exceptions.

"Those disagreements should not be aired in front of clients,” the Attorney General said.

The solicitor who will get the most loyal and urgent service is the one who deals with counsel fee notes speedily, he said.

The Attorney General said the new entrants are joining the profession at a good time, when the economy, and the demand for legal services, is growing.

He said a high level of honesty and candour is required of solicitors.

“You can’t dip into clients’ funds, even for a temporary loan,” he warned.

Standards

A small minority of solicitors had lowered standards, partly due to the pressures of the Great Recession, he said.

“It’s your generation that will restore the great standards of the profession, that dipped during the terrible period that the country went through, over the last ten years,” he said.

The AG does not believe there will be many of the legal partnerships made possible by the LSRA of 2015.

“Barristers mightn’t be too keen on notion like limited liability or shared liability. Those kinds of concepts wouldn’t be great for us.

“In reality, the relationship between barristers and solicitors has always been a quasi-partnership.

"Cases that work best for clients involve an informal partnership between solicitors and barristers.

“Good communication is the most important thing in making the relationship work. The new relationship can start on a Friday afternoon, maybe when you’ve had a slightly longer lunch,  with a phone message from a solicitor who needs help.“

The other great line from a solicitor is ‘you are certain to be paid’, he quipped.

He said the temptation when counsel asks if there is much involved, is to answer ‘oh no, it’s very simple’ when they know that’s not true.

A client’s money and innermost details are shared with a solicitor and therefore honesty and integrity are crucial, Law Society President Michael Quinlan told the emerging professionals at their parchment ceremony.

Remarking on a ‘very changed profession’ the President said that when he qualified in 1981, there were 2,300 solicitors as compared with 17,000 today.