Solicitor in IE
What this register publishes today, what is missing, and the smallest change that would move it up.
What was found
The statutory register exists and you cannot read it from where you are sitting. The Law Society maintains the register of practising solicitors under the Solicitors Act 1954, and that register may be inspected at the Society’s premises in Dublin during office hours. What is online is a directory, updated daily and useful, which states in its own disclaimer that it should not be regarded as a comprehensive list of practising solicitors or of all solicitors, and that it is provided for information purposes only. Disciplinary findings are a third thing again: a statutory register of misconduct orders, copies of which are obtained by writing to the regulation department. The Society has also had to post a notice that an AI search tool is generating inaccurate information about disciplinary findings against solicitors, which is what happens when the authoritative record is the hardest of the three to reach.
What it publishes
| Check | Answer | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| A public page per licence | Directory | Gives a reader something to look at and a checker something to archive and attest against. |
| A bulk export | No | Lets a consumer hold the whole list instead of fetching one licence at a time, and lets anyone hash it. |
| Machine readable | No | A CSV or JSON rather than a page built for a browser. Decides whether checking can be automated at all. |
| Signed | No | Makes the file impossible to forge or mirror convincingly. Nothing reaches grade A without it. |
The next step
Give every licence a stable address
The register exists but lives behind a search form, so there is nothing to link to, nothing to archive and nothing to attest against. A permanent address per licence costs little and moves this row to grade C on its own.
A grade describes a register, not the authority behind it and not the quality of its supervision. An authority can run an excellent register and still sit at grade D because it is a search form.
If this row is wrong, it gets corrected with the correction published beside it. The index is useful only if it can be argued with. Tell the lab.